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Building a Donation Smart Contract

Learn how to build a smart contract that accepts NEAR token donations, tracks contributors, and automatically forwards funds to beneficiaries. This tutorial covers the essential patterns for handling token transfers in NEAR Protocol smart contracts.

How It Works​

The donation contract demonstrates key concepts in NEAR token handling:

  • Payable Methods: Functions that can receive NEAR tokens with transactions
  • Token Transfers: Automatically forwarding received tokens to beneficiaries
  • Storage Management: Tracking donation history while managing storage costs
  • View Methods: Querying donation data without gas fees
info

The complete source code for this tutorial is available in the GitHub repository.

The repository contains:

  • contract-rs/: Rust implementation of the donation contract
  • contract-ts/: TypeScript implementation of the donation contract
  • frontend/: Next.js frontend application

A deployed contract is available on testnet at donation.near-examples.testnet for testing.

What You Will Learn​

In this tutorial, you will learn how to:

Prerequisites​

Before starting, make sure you have:

  • Basic understanding of smart contracts
  • NEAR CLI installed
  • A NEAR testnet account
  • Node.js 18+ (for TypeScript examples)
  • Rust toolchain (for Rust examples)

Contract Overview​

The donation contract includes these core features:

pub struct Contract {
    pub beneficiary: AccountId,           // Who receives donations
    pub donations: IterableMap<AccountId, NearToken>, // Track donor contributions
}

Key Methods:

  • donate() - Payable method to accept NEAR tokens
  • get_beneficiary() - View current beneficiary
  • get_donations() - List all donations with pagination
  • number_of_donors() - Count total unique donors

This tutorial will walk you through implementing each component step-by-step, with examples in both Rust and TypeScript.