Getting started

Of course, the first thing you need to do is to create a NEAR account using a wallet.

There is no official NEAR Wallet1, but there are a lot of wallets created by other teams. The most popular ones are:

There is a full list of all wallets and their features, but I don’t recommend using lesser-known wallets, especially if you’re new to the ecosystem, it’ll just waste your time and (most likely) not bring any benefits.

While I aim to keep this book objective, I know you probably don’t want to read all these pages and compare it yourself, so here’s what I recommend:

  • If you’re on a computer, use Meteor Wallet.
  • If you’re on a phone, use HERE Wallet.
  • If you want something very secure, use Ledger hardware wallet with Meteor or MyNearWallet.

Connecting to dapps

Once you have a wallet, you can connect it to a dapp (decentralized app) and start using it. You can find the most popular dapps in this book and https://www.discoverbos.org/projects, though some of them might be dead or outdated.

When you click “Connect a wallet” on the dapp’s website. it will ask you to choose a wallet and then your wallet will ask you to confirm the connection. When you connect your wallet to a dapp, you give it a permission to read your account name, balance, and sometimes, to send transactions on your behalf. Don’t worry, it can’t transfer tokens and NFTs without your confirmation, even if you connected it to a scam dapp.

Usually, these connections also request a 0.25 NEAR allowance for transaction fees, but it doesn’t use your 0.25 NEAR right away, your NEAR stays in your account, but the dapp can use some portion of it to pay for the transactions that it sends. 0.25 NEAR is the standard amount that dapps request, even if they don’t need to do any transactions. Your 0.25 NEAR is not frozen, you don’t even need to have 0.25 NEAR to connect, it’s just an allowance to use up to that much. But every connection creates a key on blockchain, which costs about 0.00004 NEAR, and you need some NEAR for storage of this key, so you can’t connect to dapps if you don’t have any NEAR at all. Logging out deletes the key, which also costs about 0.00004 NEAR.

Safety of your wallet

Most wallets will give you a seed phrase (pass phrase) when you create an account. It’s a list of (usually) 12 words that you should keep safe and never share with anyone. Even the developers of the wallet. This phrase can give access to your account to anyone who knows it, but it can also be used to restore your account if you lose access to your wallet, so it’s important to keep it safe and secret. For the best practices, see Where to save your seed phrase.

1

There was an official NEAR Wallet, but it was deprecated in favor of the community wallets, and discontinued in January 2024. MyNearWallet is the closest to the official wallet (a fork), but now it’s developed by a community team. But in my opinion, it’s the worst user experience I’ve ever seen in a crypto wallet, so I don’t recommend using it.