Keeping Up With The Evolution of DeFi On NEAR: Ref, Skyward, and Metapool Updates

With native tools such as the Rainbow Bridge, Ref Finance, and Sputnik DAO (just to name a few) NEAR did not just make DeFi affordable but also accessible. And now, with the launch of Metapool, Proximity, Skyward, and other amazing projects, it is inaugurating the golden age of DeFi.

This is the first article of a series dedicated to the state of DeFi on NEAR and will provide an overview of the updates on the hottest NEAR DeFi Apps.

Ref Finance

Ref Finance is a community owned DEX, and Ethereum friendly L1 AMM, built on NEAR. Its first version shared many similaritiescomuni with Uniswap V2 with the added benefits of supporting more pool types, multi-hope pools, and configurable fees.

Since its launch, Ref Finance has been very successful and restless in developing. In August, Ref Finance launched a fair auction through Skyward Finance that made Ref DAO successfully raise over $2.5 million USD in NEAR, DAI, and ETH pools.

On September 2nd Ref Finance brought farming to the NEAR ecosystem starting off with the following pools:

• $REF — $NEAR
• $USDT — $NEAR
• $DAI — $NEAR
• $SKYWARD — $NEAR
• $OCT — $ NEAR
• $wETH — $NEAR

In just a week, Ref farms reached $50 million.

On September 10th, Ref also went live on Coingecko.

And on September 13th on DeFi Llama.

Ref Finance total valuevalore locked boomed since the launch of Ref farming going from $4 millions to $72 million.

Some big planspiano are in the way! See their 2021 Roadmap Medium Blog and follow them on Twitter.

Skyward Finance

Skyward Finance is the premier launchpad natively built on NEAR. It allows for fair token distribution and price discovery for projects built on NEAR. It launched on the 23rd of June this year, and just a few weeks after it kicked off its first $SKYWARD token sale (doubling its price by the end of the week!).

The other token sales are going to take place every month until the end of December 2021.

In the beginning of July, Skyward Finance was listed on Ref Finance and soon after became one of the biggest liquidity pools.

In August, the Skyward App underwent some changes to achieve an optimal user experience and adding functionalities. Buttons were added to buy $nDAI and $nWETH tokens from Ref or to bridge them through Aurora. Additionally, one can now deposit tokens from Ref Finance.

Since its launch Skyward Fiance had two official token sales for $REF (from Ref Finance) and $OCT (from Octopus Network), raising respectively $6 and $10 million. On the 14th of September, another IDO for Paras was announced, which will end on the 21st of September.

Skyward was also listed on DappRadar and Coingeko and has witnessed tremendous growth, reaching the top of DappRadar rankings for NEAR Protocol.

To stay tuned with Skyward Finance’s latest news, follow them on Twitter.

Metapool

Metapool is yet another pearl springing from the NEAR Ecosystem. Live on mainnet since August, it has already made a name for itself as a premier NEAR DeFi platform. What makes Metapool unique is that it allows users to stake their fundsfondi in a more secure, profitable, and flexible way. In fact, the fundsi fondi staked are automatically allocated to the best performing validators. Staked NEAR is used as collateral and stakers get stNEAR liquid tokens that they can use to participate in DeFi Applications.

On the 23rd of August Metappol started to distribute $META as an incentive to early supporters within the community. The distribution of tokens ended on the 10th of September. This phase ended with a 3,366,073 NEAR tokens in total value locked (approximately $27 million) on the platform and a reward distribution of 10,870,000 $META tokens.

On the 14th of September the Metapool team also announced a new partnership with OIN Finance that will make stUSD and nUSD available to stNEAR holderstitolari and now also stPARAS holders that provide collateral on the stablecoin platform.

To keep up with the future of liquid staking on near follow Metapool on Twitter.

In this article we have covered the main eventseventi for Ref Finance, Skyward Finance, and Metapool. To stay updated on the evolution of DeFi on NEAR make sure to stay tuned and read the next article that will focus on Aurora, the Rainbow Bridge, and Sputnik DAO.

LaDevochka is a writer for 4NTS Guild. You can check out their Medium for more content or follow them on Twitter.