NEAR Wallet’s Evolution in 2023

NEAR Foundation and Pagoda, along with the Wallets Working Group, have conducted extensive community discussions over the last several months about the evolution of wallets in the NEAR ecosystem. In keeping with the Foundation’s goal to empower the community and continue to decentralize the ecosystem over time, the focus since NEARCON has been to expand the wallet offerings to NEAR users and to decentralize the NEAR Wallet.   

MyNearWallet is now open source and under the stewardship of Developer DAO to maintain as a public good. (Pagoda took over MNW after Kikimora ceased operations in December due to funding issues.) DevDAO announced this week that they are accepting applications for teams to take over maintenance of MyNearWallet to evolve the product while keeping it open source for the benefit of the developer community. For more information about how to apply, visit the Developer DAO gigs board on NEAR Social. 

If you have been using MyNearWallet or wallet.nearpages.wpengine.com, you don’t need to take any action. MyNearWallet service will not be interrupted in this transition and, in fact, users can expect product improvements over time from the chosen maintainer team. The goal is to offer more wallet options to users across the NEAR ecosystem and to decentralize the development of wallet products across the developer community. 

Pagoda will continue maintaining wallet.nearpages.wpengine.com. Over time, the NEAR wallet will integrate into the forthcoming NEAR Discovery product. But for now, no action is needed from users. Legacy wallet users may consider migrating to another wallet now that an expanded range of options is available via Wallet Selector, which will soon live on wallet.nearpages.wpengine.com. Numerous wallets optimizing for a variety of user types, security requirements, and use cases are already available, with more on the way in Q1. 

NEAR’s commitment to serving as the de facto entry point to Web3 remains intact. Building without limits is about continuously improving on industry standards and delivering the best possible experiences to developers and users alike.