This is part 2 of our deep dive into NEAR accounts, contracts, and keys. To recap - the end-state for writing this multi-part tutorial (and hopefully yours for reading it), is to completely understand how accounts, contracts and keys work together opening up cool possibilities for projects.
All posts by Aaron Luhning
Understanding NEAR Accounts
During Hack the Rainbow, two of the NEAR Collective's team members - Matt Lockyer and Sherif Abushadi - gave a webinar on NEAR accounts and Key Registration. They took the time to explain how NEAR accounts, contracts, and keys work.
Shortly after, another awesome developer and member of the NEAR team, Mike Purvis also did up an excellent overview of NEAR accounts/keys. Highly recommend you take a few minutes and watch it as well.
Having watched both of these a couple times, I finally decided that the only way to fully understand what's going on is to try and teach it myself by putting into practice what they're talking about.
So, this is my deep dive into NEAR accounts, contracts, and keys. My end-state for writing this multi-part tutorial (and hopefully yours for reading it), is to completely understand how accounts, contracts and keys work together opening up cool possibilities for projects.
Building a Decentralized Community Platform on NEAR
In mid-June 2020, I joined the NEAR Guild Program. NEAR Guilds take many forms but in essence, they are communities supporting the NEAR ecosystem in some way. My guild is Vital Point Guild and it's objective is to help people learn to develop using NEAR protocol by focusing on building and releasing projects for real world issues.
Once accepted, guild leaders become part of the NEAR guild community and are provided with a community platform to interact, share ideas and ask questions. We are rewarded with platform tokens for one off bounty and routine regular engagement which will eventually be exchangeable for NEAR tokens.
NEAR Accounts and Access Keys as Identities for Textile Integration
A huge foundational component of a couple of the DApps I’m currently building on NEAR are centered on user interactions and contributions in a community setting. One of them is a project I started this week that will even be a submission for HackFS. In attempting to architect them in a decentralized fashion, I need the ability to use NEAR accounts as identity providers to other decentralized services – specifically Textile for IPFS database and file storage.
A Quick Textile Primer
Textile is proving to be very useful for what I’m doing with NEAR. I think it’s a normal pattern to store high value info on chain and then link to a hash of information requiring more storage or of lesser importance stored on IPFS or some other centralized or decentralized service (like OpenSea does with NFT images) to save on costs associated with contract storage.