This repository hosts the current NEAR Protocol specification and standards. This includes the core protocol specification, APIs, contract standards, processes, and workflows.

Changes to the protocol specification and standards are called NEAR Enhancement Proposals (NEPs).

This repository uses mdBook for the Nomicon website.

NEAR Specification is under active development. Specification defines how any NEAR client should be connecting, producing blocks, reaching consensus, processing state transitions, using runtime APIs, and implementing smart contract standards as well.

Standards refer to various common interfaces and APIs that are used by smart contract developers on top of the NEAR Protocol. For example, such standards include SDK for Rust, API for fungible tokens or how to manage user's social graph.

Processes include release process for spec, clients or how standards are updated.

Ideas presented ultimately as NEPs will need to be driven by the author through the process. It's an exciting opportunity with a fair amount of responsibility from the contributor(s). Please put care into the details. NEPs that do not present convincing motivation, demonstrate understanding of the impact of the design, or are disingenuous about the drawbacks or alternatives tend to be poorly received. Again, by the time the NEP makes it to the pull request, it has a clear plan and path forward based on the discussions in the governance forum.

Spec changes are ultimately done via pull requests to this repository. However, in an effort to keep the pull request clean and readable, please follow these instructions to flesh out an idea.

1. Sign up for the governance site and make a post to the appropriate section. For instance, during the ideation phase of a standard, one might start a new conversation in the Development » Standards section. The other suggested category in the governance forum is the Development » Proposals section.
2. The forum has comment threading which allows the community and NEAR Collective to ideate, ask questions, wrestle with approaches, etc. If more immediate responses are desired, consider bringing the conversation to Discord.
3. When the governance conversations have reached a point where a clear plan is evident, create a pull request, using the instructions below.

Pull request (only when governance discussion has concluded)

• Clone this repository and create a branch with "my-feature".
• Update relevant content in the current specification that are affected by the proposal.
• Create PR, where information of the PR follows 0000-template.md to describe motivation and details of the change to the protocol. The file will be added to specs/Proposals, using the pull request number padded with zeroes. For instance, the pull request 19 might be created as specs/Proposals/0019-short-slug-description.md.
• Post pre-approval of the spec change, present a PR for NEAR Protocol client(s) that implements this specification change.
• Receive final approval and merge change into the master to be included in the next release.

Tip: build consensus and integrate feedback. NEPs that have broad support are much more likely to make progress than those that don't receive any comments. Feel free to reach out to the NEP assignee in particular to get help identify stakeholders and obstacles.

For Linux and OS X, you may run:

./build.sh

For Windows:

cargo install mdbook
mdbook build

To quickly iterate, you may also use the command:

mdbook serve