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.
You can find the implicit accounts specification here.
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:
- Short
- Full
near send $ACCOUNT <receiver> <amount>
near tokens $ACCOUNT send-near <receiver> '<amount> 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:
- Short
- Full
near send <your_account_id> 0861ea8ddd696525696ccf3148dd706c4fda981c64d8a597490472594400c223 <amount>
near tokens<your_account_id> send-near 0861ea8ddd696525696ccf3148dd706c4fda981c64d8a597490472594400c223 '<amount> 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:
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.
