Implicit Accounts
Background​
Implicit accounts work similarly to Bitcoin/Ethereum accounts.
- They allow you to reserve an account ID before it's created by generating a ED25519 key-pair locally.
- This key-pair has a public key that maps to the account ID.
- The account ID is a lowercase hex representation of the public key.
- An ED25519 Public key contains 32 bytes that maps to 64 characters account ID.
- The corresponding secret key allows you to sign transactions on behalf of this account once it's created on chain.
Specifications​
Creating an account locally​
For the purpose of this demo, we'll use the betanet network.
Set betanet network​
export NEAR_ENV=betanet
Generating a key-pair first​
near generate-key --saveImplicit
Example Output
Seed phrase: lumber habit sausage used zebra brain border exist meat muscle river hidden
Key pair: {"publicKey":"ed25519:AQgnQSR1Mp3v7xrw7egJtu3ibNzoCGwUwnEehypip9od","secretKey":"ed25519:51qTiqybe8ycXwPznA8hz7GJJQ5hyZ45wh2rm5MBBjgZ5XqFjbjta1m41pq9zbRZfWGUGWYJqH4yVhSWoW6pYFkT"}
Implicit account: 8bca86065be487de45e795b2c3154fe834d53ffa07e0a44f29e76a2a5f075df8
Storing credentials for account: 8bca86065be487de45e795b2c3154fe834d53ffa07e0a44f29e76a2a5f075df8 (network: testnet)
Saving key to '~/.near-credentials/testnet/8bca86065be487de45e795b2c3154fe834d53ffa07e0a44f29e76a2a5f075df8.json'
Using the Implicit Account​
We can export our account ID to a bash env variable:
export ACCOUNT="8bca86065be487de45e795b2c3154fe834d53ffa07e0a44f29e76a2a5f075df8"
Assuming you've received tokens on your new account, you can transfer from it using the following command:
near $ACCOUNT <receiver> <amount>
You can also replace $ACCOUNT with your actual account ID, e.g.
near send 98793cd91a3f870fb126f66285808c7e094afcfc4eda8a970f6648cdf0dbd6de <receiver> <amount>
Transferring to the implicit account​
Let's say someone gives you their account ID 0861ea8ddd696525696ccf3148dd706c4fda981c64d8a597490472594400c223. You can just transfer to it by running: You can just transfer to it by running:
near send <your_account_id> 0861ea8ddd696525696ccf3148dd706c4fda981c64d8a597490472594400c223 <amount>
BONUS: Converting public key using python (for learning purposes)​
For this flow we'll use python3 (with version 3.5+) with base58 library.
You can install this library with pip3:
pip3 install --user base58
Start python3 interpreter:
python3
The first thing is to get the data part from the public key (without ed25519: prefix). Let's store it in a variable pk58: Let's store it in a variable pk58:
pk58 = 'BGCCDDHfysuuVnaNVtEhhqeT4k9Muyem3Kpgq2U1m9HX'
Now let's import base58:
import base58
Finally, let's convert our base58 public key representation to bytes and then to hex:
base58.b58decode(pk58).hex()
Output:
'98793cd91a3f870fb126f66285808c7e094afcfc4eda8a970f6648cdf0dbd6de'
This gives us the same account ID as near-cli, so this is encouraging.
Note: The default network for near-cli is testnet. If you would like to change this to mainnet or betanet, please see near-cli network selection for instructions. If you would like to change this to mainnet or betanet, please see near-cli network selection for instructions.
