Creating a wallet is a bottleneck for attracting new users to the NEAR ecosystem. We have to explain a lot of complicated concepts at once: what is a seed phrase, what is a .near address, why you need to top up to create a wallet, how to buy NEAR, and so on. In some cases, we also have to explain what web extensions are and how to use them.
Some services solve this problem by logging in via google or creating a wallet in the background. However, this approach has its disadvantages. If a user doesn't have a crypto wallet, it's hard to motivate him to buy NEAR, which is important for the economy of most projects. Also, if a user creates a new wallet, he will lose all the progress in the service or it will have to be transferred. It is often impossible to merge several temporary accounts into one without data loss.
Volnov Petr and Andrey Zevlakov from the HERE Wallet team managed to solve this problem. They developed a mobile wallet that is available without installation and instantly creates an account on the NEAR blockchain. Instant Wallet runs on App Clip technology, which was first introduced in IOS 14. App Clip is a very lightweight app (up to 10MB) that opens instantly after scanning a QR code. Such applications are very limited in functionality however it allows you to record a seed phrase in secure storage on the iPhone, sign transactions, and confirm the uniqueness of the device.
Due to the fact that Apple allows you to confirm the uniqueness of the device, it became possible to transfer some NEAR to everyone who opened an instant wallet. The user just needs to enter a username and he is instantly allocated a gift of NEAR, he also receives ~0.01 NEAR to pay for gas. After creating the wallet he can instantly sign the transaction to register on the dApp and start using the NEAR ecosystem.
This is truly a revolutionary approach to onboarding users in Web3. As soon as the user scanned the QR code he got the wallet app, created a .near username, and got NEAR to pay for gas. The process takes less than 30 seconds, and it's a full wallet that can be converted into a native app. HERE instant wallet will take a significant place among other ways to attract users already in the nearest crypto summer.