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Address (Account ID)

NEAR accounts are identified by a unique address, which can take multiple forms:

  1. Implicit address, which are 64 characters long (e.g. fb9243ce...)
  2. Named address, which act as domains (e.g. alice.near, sub.account.testnet)
  3. An ethereum-like account (e.g. 0x85f17cf997934a597031b2e18a9ab6ebd4b9f6a4)
Valid Account IDs

In NEAR, accounts can actually be any string as long as they meet the following criteria:

  • It must have at least 2 characters and can go up to 64 characters
  • It can only use lowercase letters (a-z), digits (0-9), and separators (., -, _)

This means that all root, some-unique-string, something-to-remember-later, 0x85f17...., fb9243ce and user.name are all valid account IDs.

However, users can only create accounts that are either a named address, an implicit address, or an ethereum-like address

Searching to create an account?

You have multiple ways to create an account, you can create a web wallet, create a mobile wallet through telegram or choose any of the available NEAR wallets.

Implicit Address​

Implicit accounts are denoted by a 64 character address, which corresponds to a unique public/private key-pair. Who controls the private key of the implicit account controls the account.

For example:

  • The private key: ed25519:4x1xiJ6u3sZF3NgrwPUCnHqup2o...
  • Corresponds to the public key: ed25519:CQLP1o1F3Jbdttek3GoRJYhzfT...
  • And controls the account: a96ad3cb539b653e4b869bd7cf26590690e8971...

Implicit accounts always exist, and thus do not need to be created. However, in order to use the account you will still need to fund it with NEAR tokens (or get a relayer to pay your transaction's gas).

tip

In NEAR, you can delete the private key of an implicit account, which effectively locks the account and prevents anyone to control it

🧑‍💻 Technical: How to obtain a key-pair

The simplest way to obtain a public / private key that represents an account is using the NEAR CLI

near account create-account fund-later use-auto-generation save-to-folder ~/.near-credentials/implicit

# The file "~/.near-credentials/implicit/8bca86065be487de45e795b2c3154fe834d53ffa07e0a44f29e76a2a5f075df8.json" was saved successfully

# Here is your console command if you need to script it or re-run:
#     near account create-account fund-later use-auto-generation save-to-folder ~/.near-credentials/implicit

Named Address​

Users can register named accounts (e.g. bob.near) which are easy to remember and share.

An awesome feature of named accounts is that they can create sub-accounts of themselves, effectively working as domains:

  1. The registrar account can create top-level accounts (e.g. near, sweat, kaiching).
  2. The near account can create sub-accounts such as bob.near or alice.near
  3. bob.near can create sub-accounts of itself, such as app.bob.near
  4. Accounts cannot create sub-accounts of other accounts
    • near cannot create app.bob.near
    • account.near cannot create sub.another-account.near
  5. Accounts have no control over their sub-account, they are different entities

Anyone can create a .near or .testnet account, you just to call the create_account method of the corresponding top-level account - testnet on testnet, and near on mainnet.

🧑‍💻 Technical: How to create a named account

Named accounts are created by calling the create_account method of the network's top-level account - testnet on testnet, and near on mainnet.

near call testnet create_account '{"new_account_id": "new-acc.testnet", "new_public_key": "ed25519:<data>"}' --deposit 0.00182 --accountId funding-account.testnet --networkId testnet

We abstract this process in the NEAR CLI with the following command:

near create-account new-acc.testnet --useAccount funding-account.testnet --publicKey ed25519:<data>

You can use the same command to create sub-accounts of an existing named account:

near create-account sub-acc.new-acc.testnet --useAccount new-acc.testnet
tip

Accounts have no control over their sub-accounts, they are different entities. This means that near cannot control bob.near, and bob.near cannot control sub.bob.near.

Ethereum-like Address​

NEAR also supports Ethereum-like accounts which are identified by a hexadecimal address (e.g. 0x85f17cf997934a597031b2e18a9ab6ebd4b9f6a4). These accounts are automatically created when a user signs in on a NEAR application using an Ethereum wallet such as MetaMask.

Learn More

Learn about the technology behind Ethereum-like accounts in our Blog post