To set up an account on the NEAR blockchain, it requires you to send some number of tokens to fund that account. For example, when using the NEAR Wallet to set up a new account, you have to fund it with 3N first. Why is this?
2 Answers
You can create a NEAR "implicit" account with 0 NEAR. Near implicit accounts are the same as in Ethereum or Bitcoin. You create the a keypair locally and the public key becomes your account id (a hex string, like in Ethereum or Bitcoin)
See here: https://nomicon.io/DataStructures/Account.html and here: https://docs.near.org/docs/roles/integrator/implicit-accounts
You only need 3 NEAR if you want to create a "named" account, that is an account like alice.near that's way easier to use than implicit accounts like 641537c21dC82F97b7fC8AD778e99997beeE0d73
On NEAR, data usage is "funded" by holding a balance of tokens on the account which reserves the storage space. So, in order for the account to be created, it has to set aside some storage on the chain, which requires some amount of tokens to "pay" for those initial bytes of memory by sitting on the account.
This minimum balance depends on how much data the account uses and could start as low as < 1N for a basic account to ~40N for one with multifactor authentication and other bells and whistles added to it.
For more, see the docs at https://docs.near.org/docs/concepts/storage which describe the "state staking" approach used here.
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