Introducing Top Level Accounts and Recovery Keys on NEAR

Almost every account you rely on is issued by someone who can take it away. Your handle, your business's name, the credentials your AI agent runs on: all of it exists at a platform's discretion, and the value flowing through it sits in someone else's system. The agent economy raises the stakes. As agents start to hold budgets and transact on their own, every one of them needs an account that can hold value, spend it, and answer to its owner, and the company behind it needs to know it can shut that account down without asking a platform's permission.
The alternative has been to hold your own keys, which trades one problem for another: lose them once and the account is gone for good.
Top Level Accounts and Recovery Keys end that tradeoff. Live today on NEAR, a Top Level Account gives you a readable name that is itself a working account, owned by you in a way no platform can revoke. Recovery Keys add free recovery to any NEAR account, so losing your keys no longer means losing what they protect.
This was the plan from the start. The NEAR whitepaper described an Account Primitives layer where every actor, human, contract, or device, gets a first-class account at the top of the platform's own hierarchy, not parked inside someone else's app, backed by a reputation and history that travels with it. It named these two primitives specifically, as things that could be enabled one day: a vision of how a chain should treat identity, not a feature flagged for a release. Through House of Stake, today is that day. Governance in crypto usually means voting and not much else; House of Stake is expanding that mandate to include shipping the services that make the network stronger  and this is the first step.
A name that works like an account, because it is one
Search a namespace for a name, pay in NEAR or by card, and start using it right away.
alice.acme is a real NEAR account with its own address, balance, and transaction history. It sends NEAR, calls any contract, delegates to staking pools, holds DeFi positions, and signs you into dapps with proof of ownership (NEP-413). Anything an ordinary NEAR account can do, it can do, with one exception covered below.
You never need to buy or hold crypto to use it. Pay by card if you prefer, and when you approve an action, NEAR submits it onchain and covers the network fee. Pricing is annual, based on the length of the finished name and the tier of the namespace. If a payment settles but the account is not delivered, you can claim a refund.
Names can be sold. List at your price, take bids, or transfer directly. The handover is atomic: the moment ownership changes, every approval the previous owner prepared stops working, so a seller can never act on an account they no longer own.
How control actually works
Each account has exactly one full-access key. That key is MPC-derived and never exists whole anywhere. Nobody holds it, including NEAR.
Control lives onchain as a pointer. A contract records which signer is currently entitled to operate the account. To act, you sign an envelope; the contract verifies it before the MPC network signs the real transaction. Transfer, sale, and recovery all work the same way: the pointer changes, the key never does.
The actions you can take are fixed at the type level: function calls and transfers. AddKey, DeleteKey, and DeleteAccount cannot be expressed at all. This is what the guarantee rests on. NEAR cannot move your funds or lock you out, and no buyer, attacker, or operator can seize the name, because the operations required to do so do not exist in the system.
The honest edge case: someone who steals your approval authority could spend your balance. They still could not take the account or lock you out. If you suspect a compromise, freeze the account. While frozen it accepts nothing, including recovery, and only you can unfreeze it.
The one limitation: a Top Level Account cannot register itself as a network validator. Everything else on NEAR works.
Free recovery for any NEAR account
Losing your keys no longer has to mean losing your account. Recovery is opt-in, per account, and it works for ordinary .near accounts as well as rented names. It costs nothing.
A recovery completes only if three separate conditions all hold. The request must verifiably come through the official recovery flow. A timelock must pass, during which you are notified and can cancel. And an independent set of watchers must approve the specific destination, not just the request. If any condition fails, the recovery stops. If the account changes while a recovery is in flight, the recovery voids itself rather than overwrite the newer state. A freeze you set yourself is the one thing recovery can never override.
Namespaces for businesses and agent operators
An organization can license a whole namespace and control who registers names under it and at what price. Issue accounts to your customers, your community, or the agents you run.
For teams putting AI agents into production, this solves the problem that policy documents cannot: an account you issue under your namespace can transact and hold funds, but it cannot add keys or delete itself, so you can always freeze it, recover it, or take it back. The name carries your namespace, so anyone can see who stands behind it.
This is what it means for agents to answer to their owners rather than to a platform. The value your agents generate lands in accounts you control, and that control is enforced by the account itself, not by a provider's terms of service.
Try it
Top Level Accounts and Recovery Keys are live, delivered by House of Stake and released to the ecosystem at a cost subsidy. More than 5,000 names are live now. Search for your name at NEAR Accounts. Turn on free recovery for an existing account at NEAR Recovery. For business namespaces, join the NEAR Accounts Telegram.
If the name you want is not live yet, you can request it. Custom Top Level Accounts were not possible on NEAR until now; submit the name you want and the House of Stake team will review it.