# Introduction to Aureus ![Alea iacta est](/files/CgskaYtrhYd6EkZjFr3N) Aureus is a completely decentralized liquid staking solution that is hosted on Aurora, a massive and rapidly growing network in the NEAR ecosystem. Aurora utilizes the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) as its runtime environment. As a result, Aurora provides the user and developer experiences of mainnet Ethereum, but it has a 1 second block time and transaction fees under $0.02. The core Aureus team decided to build and deploy on Aurora because of the synergistic effects of these named attributes. --- # 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://aureus-protocol.gitbook.io/aureus-protocol/introduction-to-aureus.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.