NEAR DevEx Project Repository

Making better Developer Experience for NEAR

What is the DevEx team?

The Developer Experience (DevEx) team bridges the gap between building powerful capabilities on NEAR and making those capabilities usable for developers.

This repository serves as a public-facing tracking hub for DevEx initiatives, issues, and milestones.

Why does the DevEx team exist?

• SDKs lag behind protocol releases – new nearcore capabilities become usable days or weeks after they ship, slowing adoption.
• Release engineering is manual – version bumping, binary distribution, and downstream testing are error-prone and lack a clear SLA.
• Local testing tools lack key features – no snapshot/revert capabilities, inefficient patch_state, and other gaps compared to other blockchains make local testing painful.

By using our own features internally before releasing them publicly to testnet or mainnet, we see problems early, fix them quickly, and keep the ecosystem in sync with the protocol.

Repositories we own

Core SDKs & APIs

Repository	Description	Status
near-sdk-rs	NEAR smart contract SDK for Rust	Active
near-api-rs	Rust-based API client library for interacting with the NEAR blockchain	Evolving
near-jsonrpc-client-rs	Low-level client for interfacing with the NEAR Protocol via JSON-RPC	Migration

CLI Tools

Repository	Description	Status
near-cli-rs	CLI tool for interacting with the NEAR blockchain	Stable
cargo-near	Cargo extension for building near-sdk-rs smart contracts and ABI schemas on NEAR	Stable
cargo-near-new-project-template	Template for new cargo-near projects	Stable
near-validators-cli-rs	CLI extension for validator operations	Stable

Sandbox & Testing

Repository	Description	Status
near-sandbox-rs	Rust wrapper for the neard binary compiled with the sandbox feature flag	Stable
near-sandbox-js	JavaScript wrapper for the neard binary compiled with the sandbox feature flag	Stable
near-workspaces-rs	Rust testing framework for NEAR smart contracts	Deprecating

Primitives & Types

Repository	Description	Status
near-account-id-rs	NEAR account ID type and validation	Stable
near-gas-rs	NEAR gas type	Stable
near-sdk-abi	ABI schema types for NEAR smart contracts	Frozen
borsh-rs	Binary Object Representation Serializer for Hashing	Stable

Other

Repository	Description	Status
near-plugins	NEAR smart contract plugins	Stable
bridge-sdk-js	TypeScript SDK for cross-chain token transfers using the Omni Bridge protocol	Stable

Ownership implies responsibility for usability, maintenance, and coordinated releases - not sole authorship.

Getting in touch

• Zulip (technical discussion) - Ask your questions here: https://near.zulipchat.com/
• Discourse (non-technical / direction) - Propose ideas, share feedback: https://gov.near.org