There are 1.5 Billion Gmail accounts - wouldn’t it be cool to “just use email” to interact with blockchain and not think about private keys ?

Now you can ! (via the demo / proof-of-concept).

Demo

You start by sending email with subject “init” to [email protected] - this will create a new NEAR account for you (you’ll be able to see it on Near Explorer Selector)

(if your account is [email protected] - you’ll get foobar_gmail_com.email-demo.testnet account)

Afterwards you can use one of the other supported commands (you have to create email with a given command in a subject):

• add_key ed25519:XXXXX
• transfer baz.testnet 2.3

This currently works for emails from gmail.com domain only.

Example (from [email protected] account):

The ‘init’ email has triggered this transaction:

Near Explorer Selector

Explore the NEAR Blockchain for transactions, addresses, tokens, prices and other information.

And the account that was created:

Near Explorer Selector

Explore the NEAR Blockchain for transactions, addresses, tokens, prices and other information.

And then the second email transferred 0.4 NEAR to mm-near.testnet

Near Explorer Selector

Explore the NEAR Blockchain for transactions, addresses, tokens, prices and other information.

How does it work?

It works based on DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) where the server (in this case Google) is signing the email with their private key - and the signature is attached in email header.

When you send email to [email protected] - there is a small IMAP client, that fetches it - and puts it on chain.

Then the contract (running on email-demo.testnet) is picking it up, doing the DKIM verification and creating a new account if needed or forwarding the request.

This means that signature verification is actually done within the smart contract (so you cannot ‘forge’ a fake email).

The newly created accounts are also running a small contract - so that they follow the requests that they receive from the email-demo.testnet contract.

You can see all the code here: GitHub - mm-near/near-email-auth

What it could be used for ?

There are a lot of interesting use cases - mostly focusing around account recovery and account migrations.

Also creating new gmail accounts is relatively difficult for bots - so this could be an interesting defense against sybil attacks.

What could happen next ?

While this is only a demo - we could actually make it a “proper” protocol feature (basically having such DKIM-based email as another key type) - if there is enough support for the idea.

The potential for this is great.