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Sending $NEAR

You might want to send tokens from a contract for many reasons.

  • The contract uses something like the Storage Standard and needs to return deposits to users when they unregister.
  • Users pay into the contract and the contract later pays these fees to the maintainers, redistributes them to users, or disburses them to some cause the users vote on.
  • And more!

Blockchains give us programmable money, and the ability for a smart contract to send tokens lies at the heart of that ability.

NEAR makes this easy. Transferring NEAR tokens is the simplest transaction you can send from a smart contract. Here's all you need:

let amount = BigInt(1_000_000_000_000_000_000_000_000); // 1 $NEAR as yoctoNEAR
let to = "alice.near";

NearPromise.new(to).transfer(amount);

In the context of a full contract and function call, this could look like:

import { NearPromise, NearBindgen } from "near-sdk-js";

@NearBindgen({})
export class Contract {
  pay({ amount, to }) {
    return NearPromise.new(to).transfer(amount);
  }
}

Most of this is boilerplate you're probably familiar with by now – imports, setting up NearBindgen, etc. Some interesting details related to the transfer itself:

  • The pay method defined here accepts JSON as input, and numbers in JS cannot be larger than 2^53-1, so for compatibility with deserializing JSON to JS, the integer is serialized as a string. Since the transfer method takes a value in yoctoNEAR, it's likely to need numbers much larger than 2^53-1.

  • Returning the NearPromise: This allows NEAR Explorer, near-cli, near-api-js, and other tooling to correctly determine if a whole chain of transactions is successful. If your function does not return Promise, tools like near-cli will return immediately after your function call. And then even if the transfer fails, your function call will be considered successful.

Using near-cli or near-cli-rs, someone could invoke this function with a call like:

near call <contract> pay '{"amount": "1000000000000000000000000", "to": "example.near"}' --accountId benjiman.near
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