NEAR Protocol Development Guide

NEAR Core Features

• Human-readable account names: alice.near (string, not hexadecimal)
• Subaccounts: app.alice.near is a subaccount of alice.near
• Storage Staking: storage requires staking NEAR (1 NEAR = 10KB)
• Asynchronous cross-contract calls: via Promise, non-blocking
• Aurora: EVM chain on NEAR, runs Solidity directly
• Low gas: transaction fees < $0.001

Rust Contracts

rustup target add wasm32-unknown-unknown
cargo install cargo-near near-cli-rs
cargo near new my-contract && cd my-contract

use near_sdk::{near, store::LookupMap, AccountId};

#[near(contract_state)]
pub struct Contract {
  owner: AccountId,
  balances: LookupMap<AccountId, u128>,
}

#[near]
impl Contract {
  #[init]
  pub fn new(owner: AccountId) -> Self {
    Self { owner, balances: LookupMap::new(b"b") }
  }

  #[payable]
  pub fn deposit(&mut self) {
    let amount = near_sdk::env::attached_deposit().as_yoctonear();
    let caller = near_sdk::env::predecessor_account_id();
    let bal = self.balances.get(&caller).unwrap_or(&0);
    self.balances.insert(caller, bal + amount);
  }

  pub fn get_balance(&self, account_id: AccountId) -> u128 {
    self.balances.get(&account_id).copied().unwrap_or(0)
  }
}

# Build and deploy
cargo near build
near contract deploy my-account.testnet use-file ./target/near/my-contract.wasm without-init-call network-config testnet

JavaScript SDK (Frontend)

import { connect, keyStores, WalletConnection } from "near-api-js"
const near = await connect({
  networkId: "mainnet", nodeUrl: "https://rpc.mainnet.near.org",
  walletUrl: "https://app.mynearwallet.com",
  keyStore: new keyStores.BrowserLocalStorageKeyStore()
})
const wallet = new WalletConnection(near, "my-app")
if (!wallet.isSignedIn()) wallet.requestSignIn({ contractId: "my-contract.near" })

// view call (free)
const result = await (await near.account("my-contract.near")).viewFunction({
  contractId: "my-contract.near", methodName: "get_balance",
  args: { account_id: wallet.getAccountId() }
})

// write to contract (requires signature)
await wallet.account().functionCall({
  contractId: "my-contract.near", methodName: "deposit", args: {},
  attachedDeposit: BigInt("1000000000000000000000000"), // 1 NEAR
  gas: BigInt("30000000000000")  // 30 TGas
})

Storage Staking Considerations

1 byte ≈ 0.00001 NEAR, 1KB ≈ 0.01 NEAR. Make users pay for their own storage costs:

#[payable]
pub fn register_user(&mut self) {
  let deposit = near_sdk::env::attached_deposit().as_yoctonear();
  near_sdk::require!(deposit >= 100_000_000_000_000_000_000_000u128, "Need 0.1 NEAR for storage");
}

Aurora (EVM on NEAR)

Fully EVM compatible, Chain ID: 1313161554, RPC: https://mainnet.aurora.dev Rainbow Bridge connects NEAR and Ethereum. Deploy directly with Hardhat/Foundry.