Fletcher

What is a NEAR wallet and how do I make one?

A NEAR wallet is an app that keeps the keys to your NEAR account. The account lives on the blockchain. The wallet lets you sign messages for it. You make one by installing a wallet app, writing down its seed phrase on paper, and choosing an account name or using the one it gives you.

Take your time with this page. Nothing here asks you to buy anything.

The account and the keys are different things

On NEAR, your account is a line in the shared record. It has a name, a NEAR balance, and a list of keys that are allowed to act for it. The wallet app keeps a private key on your phone or computer. When you send something, the wallet signs the message with that key, and the network checks the signature against the account's list.

So the wallet does not "hold" your coins the way a purse holds cash. The record holds them. The wallet holds the key that can move them. If you lose the app but keep the seed phrase, you can rebuild the key in another wallet.

Two kinds of account names

Named accounts look like alice.near. They are easy to read and easy to type. Someone has to create a named account on chain, which costs a small amount of NEAR, so many wallets help with this step.

Implicit accounts are a 64-character hex string, such as 98793cd91a3f870fb126f66285808c7e094afcfc4eda8a970f6648cdf0dbd6de (this one is only an example). The name is made from your public key. It exists as soon as someone sends NEAR to it. No one has to create it first.

Both kinds work the same way for sending and receiving. A named account is simply easier for people to read. Contracts have names too. FLTC's contract is fltc-af549c.launchpad.justhoot.near, which is an account like any other, with a program attached.

The seed phrase

When you make a wallet, it shows you a list of words, usually 12. This is the seed phrase, also called the recovery phrase. It can rebuild your private key on any device.

The safety page has more on this, and on spotting copies of real tokens.

Which wallet app?

There are several NEAR wallets. Meteor Wallet is a common choice and works as a phone app and a browser extension. Others include HERE Wallet, MyNearWallet and Sender. They all do the same basic job: create or import a key, show your balances, and sign what you approve.

Download a wallet only from its official site or your phone's official app store. Check the publisher name. Fake wallet apps exist, and they are built to steal seed phrases.

Making one, step by step

  1. Install the wallet app from its official source.
  2. Choose "create a new wallet."
  3. Write down the seed phrase on paper. The app will usually ask you to confirm a few words.
  4. Set a password or PIN for the app on that device. This only locks the app. It is not the seed phrase.
  5. Use the implicit account it gives you, or pick a named account like yourname.near if the wallet offers it.
  6. To use the account, it needs a little NEAR for network fees. You can receive NEAR from an exchange or a friend.

Storage deposits: why a token needs a little NEAR first

On NEAR, every contract stores data, and storage is paid for with locked NEAR. A token contract like FLTC keeps a balance entry for each account. Before an account can hold a token, someone pays a small storage deposit to that token contract to cover the entry. Wallets and swap sites usually do this for you, in the same step as your first swap.

A real example: on 9 October 2026 the account volat.near called storage_deposit on the FLTC contract and attached 0.00125 NEAR. The network fee for that call was about 0.000219 NEAR. See it on NearBlocks.

The deposit is not a fee. It is locked, not spent. If you later remove your entry with storage_unregister (after your balance is zero), the deposit comes back. That is different from gas, which is spent. The gas fees lesson explains gas.

Next, read what gas fees on NEAR are, go back to all lessons, or open the glossary if a word was new.