A Near Wallet Compatible with Metamask

Near is a Non-EVM Chain, that means it doesn't run on an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and is a Layer-1 Blockchain, but Ethereum and their Layer-2 Blockchains are some of the strongest blockchains in the web3 ecosystem, so there is a need to create compatibility between your Layer-1 Blockchain and the rest of the Blockchains to survive in the future.

Near is a blockchain made for the common user, and their goal is to be the first web3 experience for a lot of people in the world, one of their first moves was to bring Ethereum compatibility to Near with the launch of Aurora an Ethereum Layer-2 Protocol built on top of Near Protocol.

Aurora is EVM compatible, and with the Help of the Rainbow Bridge users could interact between Near, Ethereum and Aurora. Some popular Ethereum Dapps such as 1inch or Beefy Finance are already in Aurora.

Why is the need for NETH if we have Aurora?

Aurora and Near are 2 differents blockchains, and before NETH you could use for example your metamask to add the Aurora chain but your wallet was in the end an Aurora wallet and not a Near, so if you wanted to interact with a Dapp in Near you still needed to transfer your funds from Aurora to Near, and learn to use these Near Wallets.

That was the problem Proximity Labs wanted to solve with the launch of NETH a Near Wallet that let the user create a Near account and bind it with your Metamask Wallet.

Proximity Labs is a research and development firm supporting projects building decentralized finance (DeFi) applications on Near and Aurora through grants, advisory services and developer Support - Proximity Labs Website

Image from this Tweet

How NETH Works? & My Methodology

Let me explain first how I found NETH, because this Dapp is new there isn't at the moment some labels for their Smart contracts in the Flipside Near Tables, so to find their activity I could try 2 options.

• Interact with the Contract and investigate the transactions.
• Don't Interact with the Contract and do it the hard way looking for information using the Flipside Tables from Near.

In my case I search the Near.core.fact_transactions table from flipside looking for some clues in the recipients from the transactions, because in Near, most of the contracts and users can use letters so i searched for NETH and I found 2 relevants account with that name, Nethtesting.near and NethMap.near.

After some investigation I found that NethMap.near was the smart contract of NETH, basically users interact with NETH Contract calling this contract and execute (call) 2 differents methods.

• 'set' method is when an user create a Near Wallet Using NETH, basically set means to set as an argument your Ethereum Address to your Near Wallet with the help of NETH.
• 'del' method is when an user deletes their Near Wallet using NETH.

In simple terms these 2 methods modify your Near Wallet access key and when you call the method 'set' NETH basically deletes your old key and creates a new one that you can use with your metamask wallet, and when you call the method 'del' a New key is added to your Near account that removes the metamask restriction.

Now that I know how NETH Works I'll track all the users interacting with NETH as New Users and the activity from these users will be the Activity from NETH Users.

NETH Smart Contract (nethmap.near) Activity

NETH Launched in December 19, 2022

And it's seems that after their first day NETH reached their biggest spike with 12 new users in December 20, most of the people interacting with NETH are New Users, and for example in December 24 an existing user interacted with NETH so probably it was an User looking to call the method 'del'.

It's seems that activity with NETH was really low in 2023, and only recently there is a notable influx of users.

This spike in the last days of February comes from a significant amount of bounty hunters looking to understand NETH using the Interact directly with the contract method.

Significant Names such as JackTheGuy, Adria Parcerisas, voyagercrypto, zackmendel, madinatim, alik110 and smoldata from Metrics DAO Discord can be found interacting with NETH since the start date of the Bounty (February 22).

So it doesn't seem that NETH is reaching new users in 2023.

In December 2022 there were 33 different users (MAU) reaching NETH since December 19. The Weekly Average Active Users (WAU) in December were 16.5 and the Daily Average Active Users (DAU) were only 3.7.

Still the Numbers in December are by far better than January and February 2023, and February performs better than January thanks to MDAO Bounty Hunters reaching out NETH.

Since their Launch nethmap.near received a total of 70 Transactions and their only significant spikes are during launch and in the last days (MDAO bounty) and the Average fee doesn't change over time.

Activity from NETH Users

Fenz.Near is the NETH User with most successful activity in Near with a total of 50 transactions, but since 3rd place the amount of total transactions goes down to 11 transactions.

Meanwhile most of the Activity from these users are Transfer Actions and FunctionCall Actions.

• There are more Actions than Transactions because a Transaction can have multiple Actions

It's seems that NETH Wallets doesn't interact too much with Near after the first days of NETH, making few transactions after some days.

Conclusion

NETH is an interesting Dapp, being the first wallet to give the popular metamask wallet a compatibility with a non-evm chain such as Near.

But is seems that at the moment most of the users reaching NETH are only testing the waters, looking to understand how the Dapp works and making transactions with educational purposes, because there isn't a significant activity from NETH besides the first days and the recent days.

In the First Days people were testing NETH after reaching out this Tweet with a lot of activity in December 20, but after that people lost interest in NETH as we can see the amount of days without Activity from New NETH Users and old NETH Users.

In the Recent Days people were testing NETH after Metrics DAO published their NETH Bounty, bringing back activity to NETH in the last days of February from the Bounty Hunters.

Because of that it's seems that at the moment NETH needs to increase their reach.