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Promises

Transactions can be sent asynchronously from a contract through a Promise. Like Promises in many programming languages, these will cause code to be executed in the future. In the case of NEAR, this "in the future" means a transaction to be executed in the next block (or thereabouts), rather than in the same block as the original function call.

You can implement any cross-contract workflow using Promises; they inhabit a middle-ground between the high-level and low-level approaches discussed in the last section. See the full Promise docs, linked above, for details.

However, there are a few situations where Promises are uniquely capable, since these situations don't involve making function calls:

  • Sending $NEAR
  • Creating accounts
  • Deploying contracts
Why wait?

Why not do these things synchronously, in the same block when the function is called? Why does NEAR require a Promise for sending tokens, or creating an account, or deploying a contract?

They need to be scheduled in separate blocks since sender and receiver accounts can be on different shards, and cross-shard communication happens across blocks by passing receipts (you can think of receipts in NEAR as "internal transactions"). You can see these receipts being passed from block to block in NEAR Explorer.

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