Resources

[1] Background Image , NEAR Logo [2] Ref.Finance.Staking [3] Github

DeFi Towns

To analyze NEAR’s Financial district, Let’s first identify the major DeFi towns and their main functions.

1. Ref.Finance: So far this is the largest town with many roads that bring users and core components of DeFi together, namely
   • Decentralized Exchange (DEX)
   • Lending Pool
   • Synthetic Asset Issuer
2. MetaPool: A liquidity staking protocol that provides automatic staking strategies.
   • Providing “Staked NEAR”(stNEAR) tokens for use in NEARverse.
3. Burrow: A lending and borrowing market protocol for interest-bearing assets.
   • Providing a platform to deposit stNEAR and margin trade.
4. Skyward: A permissionless open sourced launchpad for new projects with their tokens.
   • Makes it easy to launch for tokens without any initial liquidity
   • Advanced price discovery mechanism
   • Resilient against Bots and Sybil Attacks

A Routine Checkup on Dear NEAR

One of the key metrics of a healthy DeFi project(s), is the stability of growth in Total Value Locked (TVL). This number shows the total amount of coin deposits in all the functionalities of that DeFi project.

• Burrow started to show vital signals on Mainnet on March 29th 2022, the other two DeFi protocols have been around longer.
• A sudden rise in TVL is observed from March 16th- April 21st, This is around the time that:
  • NEAR’s publicity in DeFi started to rise
  • Orange DAO selected NEAR as its preferred L1 blockchain
  • A new funding amount of $350 Million was raised from Tiger Global
• As stated before a sign of a healthy DeFi is its stable TVL growth, and sudden rises such as that are most of the time faced with a mirrored reaction in decline.
• A closer look shows a gradual rise since mid-June and this is sign of a healthy DeFi ecosystem. That reflects the gradual familiarity of people with different functionalities and the growth in their interest towards the ecosystem.

Pop The Hood Check the Market Cap

Although Market cap is not completely a health metric given the whole unhealthy situation in crypto market, it still is a good metric to see how much people are willing to sell or buy in a Bull/Bear market.

• A maximum of $12 Billion is seen on mid-January and a $10 Billion drop since then on mid-June.
• Given the irregularities in the crypto market and the insane volatility it is not so out of place for $10 Billion to drop in 6 months.
• The steep rise and falls, could be an indication of whale activities. So if whales are responsible for a huge part of this chunk, it is sad to say that the financial district was infected with whale disease.
• However since June a steady growth of market cap is observed with not so many steep rise

Checkup results

Important thing to keep in mind for a healthy ecosystem or a financial district in this case, is its stable and steady growth. And our initial checkup shows that this has been the case since June 2022.

Ref.Finance Tour

Ref.Finance has the largest user base with extended functionalities, Thus it would make sense to start our tour in this town.

A Quick Health Inspection on Ref.Finance

• Ref.Finance has been on the decline in terms of new daily and success of transactions made to it.
• There can be several reason for this, it could be that for now the DeFi has saturated in terms of userbase count. Or it could mean that there are new platforms that have competitively improved functionalities.
• This could also be due the overall inactivity and stale condition of crypto market, and the increasing rise of new users in August could be a supporting theory.

Good Days And Bad Days

Daily staking activity obtained for ref.finance has been interesting. Firstly, there’s no consistent staking activity and there are only huge sudden surges every 3-4 months.

This is consistent with previous round results where we found that whale stakers like to stake for at least 3 months.

The proportionality between the number of stakers and the amount of staking is also interesting. This could be a possible indication of bot activity.

If Not Staking Then What?

We saw that Ref.Finance is not very popular for staking. Before we move further let’s first find what type of activities users prefer to do on this platform.

Next Stop Swap Avenue

Evidently Ref.Finance is preferebly used mostly for swapping activities. This makes sense since it is mostly known as a DEX and the activities also resemble that of one.

Now our next analysis destination will be on swapping activities.

It’s All in The Name

When we talk about stability, specially in crypto market, one major factor is the amount of inflow and outflow of stable coins.

Historically, USDT has been the stable coin of choice in all exchanges DEX or CEX. With the advent of DeFi other stable coins has come to play in the inner workings as well.

Our focus we’ll be on Ref.Finance as the main DEX on NEAR.

• As previously stated Ref.finance has been more active on swap transactions, and we can see that from the charts.
• Both In and out totals of stable coins are negligble in a wider scope before March 2022. The gradual growth over time in cumulative volume shows a sudden rise of interest on the protocol as a whole.
• These dates were previously discussed and major events happed prior to the dates.
• Now since July, regardless of the general stillness in crypto lake, the Ref.Finance has managed to show a constant daily volume that is higher than that before March. And this is a good sign of stable growth.

Popular Stable Coins

There’s is no doubt that USDT and USDC are the most exchanged stable coins and their volumes will be relatively higher in any type of transaction.

Now the New player that has been showing some promise as a stable coin is the USN which is a decentralized stable coin soft-pegged to the U.S dollar which is backed by a reserve that cointains NEAR and USDT in collateral.

Over the past months, The inflow of USN has been increasing both in frequency and volume. This could mean that Ref.Finance & NEAR as a whole have big plans for this stable coin.

Final Remarks

We have looked at many things in this dashboard but one word that was emphasized more and we’ve seen it in action in many markets, is the ability of a financial system or “district” to keep up a stable growth. This is true for success in any other field as well.

And the stable growth and stable coins, not directly, but are correlated in many ways. During inflation times and recession what will be most held is the stable coins and crypto exchanges should realize to be able to take the next step.