# Welcome to Aurora **What is Aurora?** Aurora is an **EVM** (Ethereum Virtual Machine) compatible blockchain layer 2 on top of **Near protocol**, combining the compatibility with the Ethereum ecosystem and the performance and scalability of Near. **How is Aurora different from other Ethereum layer 2s?** Aurora is not a rollup or a side chain. It is implemented as a **smart contract** on the NEAR Protocol. This means that Aurora inherits most of the features from Near protocol such as: * **1s block time** * **220+** Near validators * Scalability through **sharding** technology While providing ethereum compatibility: * ETH is the base token of Aurora * Transaction fees (gas fees) in Aurora are paid in ETH and are constant ([gas price](https://dev.aurora.dev/posts/evm-gas-near-gas-on-aurora) is 0.07 GWei, which is around **$0.003 per transaction**). * Aurora supports all the Ethereum ecosystem tools — [MetaMask](https://metamask.io/), [Foundry](https://github.com/foundry-rs), [Truffle](https://www.trufflesuite.com/truffle), [Hardhat](https://hardhat.org/), [Remix](https://remix.ethereum.org/), etc... **What are the TPS on Aurora?** Transactions Per Second is a common measure of performance for blockchains. Since Aurora inherits its characteristics from Near Protocol, the TPS are the same as on Near which are around **1k TPS.** Note that the TPS number depends a lot on the size of transactions (a simple transfer will be smaller than a swap for instance) so numbers can vary greatly. * During peaks, TPS on Aurora could be around **10k** * Thanks to the sharding technology of Near, TPS could go up to **100k** with the current shards * And theoretically it actually has **no limit** since sharding offers horizontal scaling **What programming language do I need to know to deploy on Aurora?** As an EVM compatible chain, smart contracts on Aurora are written in Solidity, exactly how it is done on Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum or any other EVM chain. **I already have a dapp on Polygon, can I migrate to Aurora?** Absolutely, since both chains are EVM compatible, you can simply redeploy your smart contracts on Aurora without additional development, and you will instantly benefit from the **high throughput** and **low transaction costs**. **What are Virtual Chains?** Virtual Chains are dedicated instances of the Aurora Engine, customised to a specific application. Read more about Virtual Chains in the next section. --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://aurora-labs.gitbook.io/aurora-cloud-documentation/welcome/readme.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.