NEAR Account – Express Guide

Intro to NEAR Account

1. NEAR uses account identifiers that are readable by humans in the format name.near. For example, maria.near or jane.near. NEAR accounts are not case-sensitive. In fact only low case letters can be used. Your NEAR account ID can contain any of the following:
   • Lowercase characters (a-z)
   • Digits (0-9)
   • Characters (_-) can be used as separators

   Your account ID CANNOT contain:

   • Characters “@” or “.”
   • Fewer than 2 characters
   • More than 64 characters (including .near).
2. The NEAR account system is similar to the website domain system in the sense that an account can create as many sub accounts as needed. For example, an account with the name maria.near can create an account like sub.maria.near, and it in turn can create the accounts first.sub.masha.near, second.sub.maria.near and so on. You can create sub-account using NEAR CLI or at NameSky
3. NEAR Wallets like MyNEARWallet, Meteor wallet, Here wallet, Hot wallet or Bitte wallet or near-cli  (command line interface that delivers functionality for NEAR integration) can all be used to create an account.
4. You can check account information in the NEARBlocks, Pikespeak or NEAR Wallet of you
5. Besides visible accounts (name.near type), the NEAR also supports the creation of Implicit accounts are denoted by a 64 character address, which corresponds to a unique public/private key-pair. You can find a detailed English guide here
6. Every account in the system can have only 1 smart-contract. For apps that require the user to use multiple smart contracts child accounts can be used.  For example contract_1.maria.near, contract_2.maria.near, etc.

NEAR ACCOUNT – Keys

1. NEAR like most other blockchains is based on cryptography with an open key. It relies on pairs of keys each of which consists of an open key (public key) matched with a closed key (private key).
2. NEAR uses the open key for identification and the closed key for signing transactions (confirmation of account ownership during transaction creation).
3. In NEAR there are 3 types of keys. Access keys are for signing transactions from the account, validator keys allow for operations relating to network validation, node keys (network node) allow for low-level communication between nodes on the network.
4. Keys can be stored in 3 different storages. InMemoryKeyStore – memory storage, used for temporary scenarios. BrowserLocalStorageKeyStore – unencrypted local browser storage, used to work with applications in the browser. UnencryptedFileSystemKeyStore – unencrypted storage in the file system, used when working with near-cli.
5. An account can have multiple access keys or none.
6. Keys can have different access levels – FullAccess (full access) or FunctionCall (only the ability to call contract methods).
7. All keys are unique within one account, but the public key can be assigned to different accounts with different access levels. The access level determines what actions in the account can be performed with this key.
8. For the FullAccess access level, all 8 types of actions are available: CreateAccountAction (create an account), DeployContractAction (deploy a contract), FunctionCallAction (call contract methods), TransferAction (send tokens to another account), StakeAction (staking tokens), AddKeyAction (add a key to an account), DeleteKeyAction (delete an account key), DeleteAccountAction (delete an account).
9. For the FunctionCall access level, only the FunctionCallAction is available (calling contract methods). Also, for such a key, you can specify which contract methods it can call.