Throughout the whole lifespan of the Burrow Cash protocol, more than $2b have both been entered and exited the platform, resulting in a negative netflow of around $40m. The negative value is due to the difference between the borrowed and repaid amounts.

In a timely manner, the activity on Burrow has considerably dropped since July 2022. While both the inflows and outflows were in the scale of multi-million dollars in the first few months, they are now less than a million. Although the Terra crash back in May 2022 or the FTX crash in late 2022 might be causes of this decline, the protocol has not regained even a portion of its initial activity.

From another perspective, the website has not been available for many users and they face the warning message shown here. This might also be another reason for the heavy volume drop.

Burrow is a platform that allows users to earn interest by supplying assets and also borrow against them to access liquidity. It operates as a decentralized, non-custodial, pool-based interest rates platform, similar to other protocols like Aave and Compound. Burrow runs on the NEAR blockchain, which is a proof-of-stake, sharded blockchain with a WebAssembly runtime. Burrow is designed to support layer 1 staking derivatives such as stNEAR and stETH. For instance, users of Burrow will be able to deposit stNEAR as collateral, then borrow more NEAR to create a leveraged staking position or borrow a stablecoin to create a self-repaying position.

Here are some key takeaways extracted from the analysis of Burrow, the largest native lending protocol on NEAR (according to DeFiLlama):

• Although the platform had significant activity during its first few months, it has lost almost all of those daily volumes.
• It went from a volume of nearly $350m in both inflows and outflows at its peak back in early 2022 to less than a million dollars in 2023.
• At the time of writing (early April 2023) there was a $250m gap between the borrowed and repaid amount which could explain the negative netflow of around $40m on the protocol.
• On a positive note, even though the users of the platform majorly decreased and the liquidity of the pools shrank, those remaining users were actively borrowing tokens and using the lending platform.
• Token-wise, stablecoins (USDC, USDT, and DAI) as well as wNEAR were the dominant and most favorable tokens among the users.
• USDC and USDT were borrowed more than deposited, resulting in a considerable negative net flow for both of them.
• While the number of BRRR token holders staking their tokens has gradually decreased over time, the volume of staked tokens has not had a clear trend.
• And on a side note, the Burrow website has not been available for many users and shows them a warning message when they try to access that. This might also be another reason for the heavy drop in user activity.

From the lending perspective, more than $1b was deposited to the platform throughout its existence. There is a $250m gap between the borrowed and repaid amount which could explain the negative netflow of the protocol. Also, the difference between the withdrawals and deposits is around $200 which overall is a positive outcome for Burrow.

As mentioned before, although the activity has significantly decreased, the share of borrowings and repayments has increased. In other words, users who inject or take out liquidity from the protocol have not been active recently. On the other hand, the remaining users use the lending platform to borrow liquidity.

The changes in the number of users performing each action on the platform have been relatively the same as the transferred volume. While the number of users who withdrew their tokens increased in the second half of 2022, the remaining users have become more active in borrowing liquidity from the platform.