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New to NEAR?

Welcome! If you have questions along the way, join our community on Discord and reach out! We're here to help.

What is NEAR?

NEAR is a blockchain that has been built from the ground up to be high-performant, incredibly secure, and infinitely scalable all while supporting sustainability.

Simply put, NEAR is a layer one, sharded, proof-of-stake blockchain built for usability and scalability.

Why Build on NEAR?

How do I get started?

  1. Create an account.
  2. Choose a starter project.
  3. Check out the NEAR Explorer.
  4. Try out the Developer Console.
  5. Dive into the docs.
  6. Enroll in NEAR University.
  7. Join our Discord!

Account Model

Accounts

As mentioned earlier, NEAR uses human-readable account names such as alice.near or bob.near instead of a public hash such as0x71C7656EC7ab88b098defB751B7401B5f6d8976F.

These accounts also have the permission to create subaccounts such as nft.alice.near or example2.bob.near. It's important to know that only the root account can create the subaccount. So only alice.near can create nft.alice.near and only nft.alice.near can create example.nft.alice.near. Note that alice.near does not have permission to create example.nft.alice.near. Only the direct parent account has permission to create a subaccount.

tip

For more information see the accounts section.

Keys

On most blockchains, there is one public/private key pair per account. On NEAR, each account can have many key pairs associated with them which we call "Access Keys". There are two types of "Access Keys":

Full access keys allow for full control of the account. You can send funds, create sub-accounts, delete the account, and more. Function call keys only allow for calling certain methods on a specific smart contract that do not allow the transferring of funds. These keys can be used by dApp developers to allow users to sign simple transactions that mutate state on the blockchain without having to constantly re-direct to the user's wallet to prompt for authorization. They can be widely or narrowly scoped depending on the use case.

tip

For more information see the access keys section.

Contracts

For each account, only one smart contract can be deployed and active at any given moment. All smart contracts on NEAR must be compiled to WebAssemly and currently, AssemblyScript and Rust are the supported languages used. Smart contracts that have been deployed can be updated at any time but not removed. This is where sub-accounts can come in handy. NEAR allows users to organize and create a hierarchy for their accounts.

As an example, benji could have the root account benji.near. He then stores all his NFT contracts as sub-accounts of nft.benji.near. For example, he worked on a cool lazy minting contract deployed to lazy.nft.benji.near. This not only allows for better organization but it allows developers to easily delete and re-create accounts in order to clear state.

tip

For more information see a guide on deploying contracts.

Storage

Any information that is stored on NEAR is accounted for using a mechanism called storage staking. In short, an account must maintain a certain balance that is locked in order to cover the cost of storage. If that storage is released, the funds become available once again. This is why named account IDs on NEAR cost an initial deposit to create. If you attempt to store state on-chain without having the necessary balance in your account to cover the cost, an error will be thrown which will tell you to add more NEAR to your account.

tip

For more information on storage staking, see the storage staking section.

What else can I explore?

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