Overview:

NEAR Protocol is a smart contract platform, which focuses on developer and user-friendliness. It provides a scalable platform for running applications.

Ref Finance:

Ref Finance was the ==first Defi platform on NEAR==. The first version of Ref had some similarities with Uniswap V2, along with support for more pool types, and configurable fees, and it is entirely community-owned. Its main aim is to bring together core components of Defi like decentralized exchange (DEX), lending protocol, synthetic asset issuer, etc. Ref Finance has a treasury of 35 million $REF of which 10% is allocated to development fun for upcoming projects and 25% for future community-related activities, events, and partnerships.

==Ref Finance:==

Features of Ref Finance

• Ref’s AMM DEX allows permissionless and automated trading between any native NEAR or bridged token.
•  Liquidity providers can earn $REF or NEP-141 tokens by staking LP tokens.
• Users can stake $REF tokens to earn more $REF over time.

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How Ref Finance works:

Participants can either trade or become a liquidity provider (or both) in the platform by depositing an equivalent of each underlying token in exchange for LP tokens, also called “pool tokens.” Uniswap’s liquidity pools might be more popular than Ref Finance’s for the time being, but it doesn’t mean that Ref’s services are inferior in any way.

Ref Finance’s advantage over Uniswap is that its smart contract contains all pairs of liquidity pools, which comprise reserves of two or three NEP-141 tokens, kind of like the ERC-20 tokens of NEAR.

Ref is by far the most popular Defi platform on NEAR, allowing users to trade, pool their tokens in liquidity pools (LP), and farm their LP tokens to earn rewards. Additionally, the protocol has a token, $REF, which can be staked to earn fees generated by the protocol.

Let us take a look at the metrics below and see if anything has changed in the past 90 days.

By looking at the 1st bar chart above, we see the number of unique wallets interacting with Ref finance was decreasing month by month from August until now. In August the amount of Ref users increased to almost 4k but again in September we had another decrease in Ref unique users. In October also the users are only around 1885 as of today.

Also in August $NEAR experienced a lite growth on its price chart and we can see users growth in Ref as well. As of today the price is 3.03$

The second bar chart depicts the activity of users that use Ref finance. It is observed that users making between 2-10 transactions are the highest. It accounts for about 3729 users followed by users making only 1 transaction (1536 users)

The last green bar chart illustrates the retention numbers of users using Ref finance. It is seen that in past 90 days not a lot of users are retaining more the than a day. In fact, 4695 users account for the highest retention for using REf Finance for less than a day. This record seems poor actually.

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• 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.
• Previously, there was a bigger proportion of successful transactions compared to failed oness. But in the past 90 days, the trend has completely changed and we can see that the failed transactions have surpassed the successful ones and account for about 84.2% of total transactions in last 90 days.
• The add liquidity’ transactions have remained in the range of 100 to 500.

From the visualisations above, we observe that ==Majority of the transactions involving ref finance is related to swapping==. It appears that the swapping activity is among the crowd pullers for Ref Finance. Until a few months back, Withdraw and claim_reward for staking are the next favorite things for customers to do at the Ref-finance bank but now they too account for less than 1% of the user base.

In the ==early days of the protocol==, the number of swaps was large, the ==total volume was low==. This might indicate that people had low confidence in the protocol or that the whales stayed away initially.

However, in the last 90 days, both swaps and volume have been following a similar trend. It is noticed that the swaps and volume are coming below usual in the past month.

The graph on left shows the number of transactions related to the Ref. finance platform compared to the transactions that occurred on other platforms in the NEAR blockchain.

In the past 90 days, it is observed that non-ref transactions have surpassed the ref transactions greatly! As of writing, the number of REf transactions is 3253 and the number of non-ref transactions is 409K.

In August, there was a high amount of swap transactions on a day but after that, it dropped and never went that high until date!

Conclusions:

• $NEAR’s price has a high impact on using Ref finance, when $NEAR is bullish more users interact with Ref finance, and when it’s bearish users’ activity on Ref decrease.
• Ref finance had good effects on making Near users active in august 2022 but after that until now, the user base has dramatically reduced.
• The status of failed transactions has surpassed successful transactions in the past 90 days and accounts for about 80+ % of total transactions.
• considering activity on Ref finance, swaps are more by users compared to other activities. But the number of swaps are also reducing in the past 90 days.
• Larger group of people do no ref transactions copared to ref transactions. The ref transactions has been dramatically low after august.
• Ref can be one of the main reasons about Near’s possible bad performance in completing the transactions. all of Near’s failed transactions are happing on Ref Finance.
• Looks like there really is winter season in the city of NEAR especially when it comes to the central bank of NEAR!.