Account names
In NEAR, account names (account IDs) are human-readable names that are unique
across the entire network. They are used to identify accounts and can be used
to receive tokens, deploy contracts, and more. Because of that, you can see
in your wallet that are trying to send tokens to slimedragon.near, or
interact with v2.ref-finance.near, which are
legitimate addresses, the same way as you can do a search and see that you’re
searching on google.com, not a fake copy.
Valid account names
There are 2 types of account names: implicit and named. Implicit account names are the ones that consist of 64 seemingly random characters. Example: 998765b2120bf0ca10a9242343fdbda6612a48b279d69c9e4d99dbf5adda7d93. If you don’t want to be ashamed of your address when someone asks you for it, you shouldn’t use it. Instead, use named accounts. Named accounts are human-readable. Examples:
slimedragon.nearroot.nearsub.slimedragon.nearslimedrgn.tg
Named account IDs can contain alphanumeric symbols, hyphens, underscores, and must be between 2 and 64 characters long. They can’t start or end with a hyphen, and can’t have two or more consecutive hyphens.
Implicit accounts
Implicit accounts are accounts that contain 64 characters 0-9 and a-f. They cannot be created like normal named accounts, they always exist, but are initialized only when they receive some NEAR. By default, they have a full key with public key the same as its address (but encoded in base58), and no other keys, so it’s impossible to create an account with a predetermined implicit account ID.
Top-level names
Most commonly you’ll encounter wallets ending with .near, but there are other
top-level names, like .tg (can be created in HOT Wallet),
.sweat (cannot be created by users, used by Sweat Economy’s
smart contracts), .kaiching, .vrtx, .aurora, and
so on, but most of them are used internally and cannot be created by users.
Top-level (without .something) account IDs with lengths >= 32 characters could be
created by anyone, but they were used very often, and now it’s not possible. For example, this-account-is-owned-by-a-green-slime
is a valid account ID that can be created by anyone. Top-level accounts can only be created by registrar, a system account. In the future,
there may be auctions of top-level accounts, but now they are given manually by registrar owner, which is most likely controlled by Pagoda or Near Foundation.
Subaccounts
If you have an account with name slimedragon.near, you (and only you!) can create
an account called something.slimedragon.near. But after you create this account, it’s
a fully independent account.
Technically, near is also a top-level account, all .near accounts are its subaccounts,
but near doesn’t have access to your .near account, and can’t create slimething.slimedragon.near,
if that makes it easier to understand. For more information, visit docs.near.org