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.

Creating an account locally

For the purpose of this demo, we’ll use the betanet network.

Set betanet network

export NEAR_ENV=betanet

Generating the Implicit account

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

Example Output

The file "~/.near-credentials/testnet/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

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:

“`bash
near send $ACCOUNT
“`

“`bash
near tokens $ACCOUNT send-near ‘ NEAR’ network-config testnet sign-with-keychain send
“`

Transferring to the implicit account

Let’s say someone gives you their account ID 0861ea8ddd696525696ccf3148dd706c4fda981c64d8a597490472594400c223. You can just transfer to it by running:

“`bash
near send 0861ea8ddd696525696ccf3148dd706c4fda981c64d8a597490472594400c223
“`

“`bash
near tokens send-near 0861ea8ddd696525696ccf3148dd706c4fda981c64d8a597490472594400c223 ‘ NEAR’ network-config testnet sign-with-keychain send
“`

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:

pk58 = 'BGCCDDHfysuuVnaNVtEhhqeT4k9Muyem3Kpgq2U1m9HX'

Now let’s 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.