Introduction

The City of Near doesn’t stop surprising us with its impressive sights. The next step on your journey, traveller, is the Financial District. You may ask - why focus on the finances if I came here on a journey…?

There are many reasons as to why the Financial District is one of the pillars of Near - in this dashboard, you will find the analysis of some of the most popular DeFi products built on Near, as well as some of the more general metrics.

Our journey will be as follows:

1. Firstly, we will explore the most popular financial sight, Ref Finance. We will look into the number of transactions, how many of them fail, and how much gas they burn.
2. We then stop for a little bit in Burrow, another very popular DeFi platform in the City of Near. We will conduct some analysis based on the TVL, and the TVL and Collateral utilisation ratios. We also explore the popularity of tokens based on each category, such as ‘deposit’, ‘borrow’, ‘withdraw’ and ‘liquidation’.
3. We then go on to dive into who the citizens of the City are, whether they are a whale or a small fish, and look into their staking behaviours.
4. Lastly, as the final, more general analysis, we look into what are some of the most popular tokens transacted across the whole City, based on the number of swaps, the number of traders, as well as the overall USD volume.

The Financial District holds so many sights to explore - I hope you will enjoy this part of your journey! 😎

The calculations do not include the Current Date as it will always be incomplete until the day ends.

-- ==First stop in the Financial District: Ref Finance== --

Our first stop in the Financial District is Ref Finance. In the following section we’ll dig into some core metrics that explain it’s place in terms of TVL on Near.

Key points:

• Ref Finance users are mainly swapping assets while they are in the City. A big portion of the total number of transactions executed counts as unlabelled, because there are no logs in the tables, which is sadly outside of my control.
• It’s good to see that there are more ‘add liquidity’ transactions than ‘remove liquidity’, meaning that a bigger proportion of users is staying with Ref Finance.
• A bigger proportion of successful transactions compared to failed ones is always good to see, Ref Finance seems to be working smoothly, except for a few days where we can see the failure rate increase to over 70%.
• Users are spending quite a lot of gas on Ref Finance, but mostly on successful transactions - we can see the standard correlation, that with more transactions executed more gas is being used on a daily basis. The busier the City of Near, the more money is spent on souvenirs - simple!
• At the time of writing, there has been a real increase in the interest in Near’s Financial District. We can see over 1.25M swap transactions in just one day (August 21st 2022) - which is a crazy number in comparison to the previous weeks! This is also translated in the gas spent, we can see this clearly on the scatter graph which looks very quiet, apart from two massive values on August 21st and 22nd, with over 3M transactions executed in just two days!

-- ==Second stop in the Financial District: Burrow== --

Burrow is our next stop in the Financial District. This DeFi protocol is an interest rate market protocol allows users to supply and borrow interest-bearing assets. Users can deposit stNEAR and earn ~ 11% interest per year, and then borrow against it. Let’s deep-dive into some of the key metrics and analyse how the situation is looking like on Burrow.

Key insights:

• It seems as if the users’ interest has been on a decline since the initial excitement right after the product launched. We can see that there are still some newcomers joining Burrow, however, the cumulative plot tells us that the growth has stabilised.

  1. TVL = Total Deposits, comprising of remaining liquidity + borrowed assets withdrawn by borrowers
  2. Borrow = Total value of assets borrowed
  3. Collateral = Amount of deposited assets (TVL) which are collateral
  4. Liquidity = Remaining liquidity available for borrowing

  We can see that all of these metrics are closely related, and have been following the same pattern. At the time of writing, the Burrow TVL is a lot lower ($70M) than what it was all-time-high ($464M), which only shows how much impact the bear market had on the Burrow platform.

• At the time of writing, about 20% of the TVL is being borrowed by users on Burrow. Initially, TVL Utilisation was close to Collateral utilisation, meaning that most users who deposited their assets into Burrow used it as collateral at the start.

  This gap between TVL and Collateral utilisation deviated in May, which indicates most users depositing their assets, but not as collateral.

The next step is to look at which tokens have seen the most USD volume across the 4 different categories on Burrow.

-- ==Are you a fish, or a whale?== --

Now that we looked into two of the most popular DeFi protocols on Near, it’d be interesting to differentiate between the big fish and the small fish. Every traveller has a different income and a different budget for the journey through the City - but who are the users with the biggest Near balances? Let’s look at the top 100 addresses, as well as how their staking behaviour differs from how much small fish are staking!

What can we learn from this?

• There are quite a lot of whales present within the ecosystem. At the time of writing, the biggest whale holds over 42M of Near tokens!
• It is interesting to look at the cumulative graphs side by side, for the small fish and the big fish. We can see that whales staked over 17M USD, compared to only almost 8M USD staked by smaller fish.
• This is proportional to the number of staking transactions, as whales executed 1400+ staking transactions as of now, compared to less than a thousand staking transactions executed by smaller fish.
• This section has been written by forking the code from @0xHaM☰d - thank you!

-- ==What tokens are the most popular on NEAR?== --

We have just explored the difference between the big fish and the small fish, but now, back to the overall picture. Every traveler needs to bring some money on their journey, we are yet to investigate which currencies (tokens) are the most popular amongst Near’s users. Let’s compare the most popular tokens by looking at the USD volumes, the swap counts as well as the count of traders!

Given that you, the traveller, just bridged into the City of Near, you must be curious what tokens users are transacting with the most, not only in the Financial District, but throughout the entire City. Let’s find out!

• NEAR, USDT and USDC have seen the most buy/sell volume, the most swaps as well as the overall volume.
• However, we can see that these are not necessarily the most traded tokens, as REF token seems to appear on the final pie chart, with almost 30k of unique traders.
• We also see tokens such as Octopus Network token, or the Jumbo token with quite a big number of traders overall.

Conclusion

The Financial District in the City of Near comes with a lot of places to explore. In this dashboard, we have only touched the tip of the iceberg and mainly focused on the two most popular DeFi products: Ref Finance and Burrow. We have also looked at which tokens are being used the most in the City of Near, and discovered who are some of the biggest whales in the City. Lastly, we also touched on staking, and how it varies between the big fish and the small fish.

This dashboard wouldn’t include all of these insights if it wasn’t for some of the greatest Near analysts. I have mentioned which section includes forked code, but once again a big shout-out to @Pinehearst and @0xHaM☰d for their amazing work on Near! 💙

So, that’s finances sorted, right…? Now that you have the correct currencies to enjoy the City, go back to the guide - maybe you will find what to buy with your freshly sourced tokens!

• Dashboard (and artwork created for the purpose of this tournament) created by -pine-nat-#4310
• Twitter:
• Refresh Rate - Daily
• Data from FlipsideCrypto

• Stablecoins are the definite winners on Burrow, when it comes to depositing, withdrawing or borrowing - we can see USDC and USDT present with huge volumes across these categories.

• When it comes to depositing and borrowing, users also like to use the native NEAR token, which is what we would expect to see.

• I think the most interesting insight here is the fact that NEAR is the token liquidated the most, by the USD volume, as well as the stNEAR token.

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• The charts in this section have been ‘burrowed’ (pun intended) from the one and only @Pinehearst, a true God of Near!

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