Metaplex Launches Aura Network, Enhancing Data Availability and Indexing on Solana

After presenting its new product to a small audience at Breakpoint’s ‘The Pod’ stage, Metaplex has announced its Aura Network to rest of the crypto industry.

A decentralized data availability and indexing network, Metaplex’s new Aura Network aims to facilitate enhanced data storage and retrieval, while mitigating the network’s previous reliance on central points of failure.

What is The Aura Network?

Metaplex argues that, in its current state, the Solana network is ill-equipped to provide timely and decentralized data availability and indexing services. Decentralized applications face difficulty competing with centralized rivals due to sluggish and expensive access to blockchain state.

The Aura Network aims to solve this problem through the deployment of Aura nodes, which can index asset data at scale and offer real-time data availability for compressed and uncompressed state. By leveraging a range of new features and developer tooling, Aura Network is a fast and cost-effective method for managing onchain data.

How Does Aura Benefit Solana?

One of Solana’s key infrastructure providers, Metaplex is best known for creating Solana’s dominant DAS (Digital Asset Standard), a protocol used to power and represent the vast majority of Solana-based assets. 

Beyond these essential building blocks, Metaplex also developed the MPL (Metaplex Program Library), a trusted database of Solana programs and smart contracts. Drawing on the team’s wealth of experience in Solana infrastructure development, the Aura Network focuses on three main services:

• Data Availability - Aura Network ensures digital asset data is always accessible and retrievable in a dencentralized manner, eliminating the concerns of a singular point of failure.

• Digital Asset Standard API Enhancement - Aura Network improves the DAS API’s indexing performance, allowing for more scalable data management across Solana and SVM (Solana Virtual Machine) networks.

• Flexible Compression - Both users and developers can compress and decompress assets on demand, allowing for rapid and affordable manipulation of SVM account space and asset data.

Over 25 Solana ecosystem projects have been named as Aura Network launch partners, including key players like Tensor and Magic Eden. These teams are responsible for providing valuable feedback on the product and exploring how Aura can be implemented with their applications.

The Aura Network is fully open-source, with all associated source code available on Github. As of Metaplex’s announcement, Aura is live on mainnet and devnet.

$MPLX Up 50% On Rising Liquidity

The Aura Network reveal explains the impressive performance of Metaplex’s native governance token, $MPLX, over the past week.

Based on Step Finance data, $MPLX has risen 50.3% in the past 7D, climbing from $0.296 to currently exchange hands at $0.445.

$MPLX’s positive price movement has been further supported by its growing liquidity. In the days leading up to the announcement, a new MPLX/SOL liquidity pool was created, which now hosts over $900k in pooled assets. According to Step Finance data, the creation of the new pool has caused $MPLX’s onchain liquidity to grow by 1,085%.

The dramatic increase in price and liquidity is thought to be due to a $500k DCA order placed by Sigil Fund, who currently hold over $3.8M worth of $MPLX.

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