Wrapped NEAR (Universal) wallet

What is Wrapped NEAR (Universal) (UNEAR)?

Two very different things are called NEAR once uNEAR enters the picture. One is the coin that pays gas on the NEAR blockchain and is held by named accounts such as alice.near. The other, uNEAR, is an ERC-20 token on Base, issued by the Universal protocol against NEAR that permissioned merchants deposit and lock, and it lives at an ordinary 0x address.

Everything that makes NEAR itself distinctive is absent from the wrapped version. There are no human-readable account names, no storage staking, no access keys, no delegation to NEAR validators. uNEAR is a balance in an EVM contract whose value follows NEAR, usable in the lending and swap applications that exist on Base. Converting back to the real coin means redeeming through the merchant network or trading out.

Because the two forms share a name and a price, the place a transfer is going matters. A NEAR account address and a Base address look nothing alike, but the same 0x address is valid on every EVM chain, so the network a transaction is broadcast on is a separate decision from the address you paste. Tangem keeps balances per network rather than pooling them, and the outgoing network is shown on the screen before the card is tapped to sign, which gives you a last look at it while you still can. Checking that line is the one habit worth keeping with a wrapped token.

Supported networks in Tangem (1): Base.