This Week in Near Ecosystem W31/2021

5 min readAug 9, 2021

Last week was full of updates and news on the NEAR Protocol ecosystem, such as REF Airdrop, Ref Finance roadmap, and Coin98 Wallet in cooperation with Near Protocol and Ref Finance.

Let’s go through and break down the events of week 31st of NEAR Protocol.

Overview Of The NEAR Ecosystem’s Weekly Update W30

Important Updates

Since Near Protocol is already quite complete in terms of infrastructure applications, with such apps as Aurora EVM and Rainbow Bridge, the next big update that the whole ecosystem is looking forward to is the launch of Octopus Network’s mainnet appchain in September or October this year.
After the ETH-NEAR bridge, the BSC-NEAR bridge is being developed. After the BSC-NEAR bridge, SOL-NEAR will be the next choice of the ecosystem development team. If the bridges are completed soon, this will be a good premise for money to flow into the Near Ecosystem.

NEAR’s Impressive Performance Numbers

$2.1 million in assets were deposited to Near via Rainbow Bridge. Compared to the previous week, there is a slight increase of $20,000 in asset value.
In the past week, the volume of weekly transactions continued to increase by 1,300,000 transactions. The total number of transactions on Near Protocol is about to hit the milestone of 20 million transactions. This is the next breakthrough for the platform after it reached 10 million transactions at the end of June.
Over the past week, the number of stablecoins on Near has returned to $1.3 million. In comparison with the last week, we can see a slight decrease of $70,000.

New Projects

We did not see any new projects in the past week. However, there are many important updates of the ecosystem:

Ref Finance has airdropped REF tokens to users who have been supporting the project. A total of 1 million $REF has been distributed.
Ref Finance has laid out their project’s roadmap for the near future, which has many attractive plans.
Coin98 Wallet will integrate with dApps on Near Protocol, starting with Ref Finance.
Skyward Finance has completed the second SKYWARD token sale.

There are also some notable events about the ecosystem, which I will go into detail later.

Dissecting The News

Stablecoin, Lending & Borrowing

The total amount of stablecoins on Near, after a sudden increase to $1.4 million, has returned to $1.3 million. In which, nearly $900 thousand is DAI. The rest are other stablecoins, including USDT, USDC, and TUSD. The total value of assets on Ethereum on this Bridge is at nearly $2 million.

It’s fair to say that the recent REF token sale has successfully bootstrapped the ecosystem. This is the key to stimulate the cash flow for the Near ecosystem because AMM DEX is the most important piece of any ecosystem. From here, we can expect a series of token launches in the Near ecosystem. Some of the names that can continue to bootstrap the Near ecosystem in the near future are Metapool, Paras, Aurora, Octopus, etc.

The current Lending & Borrowing and DeFi Stablecoin platforms are extremely inadequate. Going forward, a lending protocol will certainly appear for the ecosystem to be bootstrapped. In its recently laid out Roadmap, Ref Finance announced a plan to develop the Lending Protocol in 2022 once it completes the AMM DEX development.

AMM DEX

Ref Finance’s FDV is currently over $100 million. Over the past week, Ref Finance launched their airdrop for early users, consisting of 1 million REF tokens. If calculated with an FDV of $100 million, the airdrop for a wallet that both trades and provides qualified liquidity is worth nearly $600. REF airdrop will remain locked for 3 months. The team will start vesting 1 month after that.

The requirements for a user to be eligible for airdrop are quite demanding. According to REF Finance, there are two reasons for it:

It is very difficult to split airdrop by volume due to the fact Near currently has no data indexing tool.
If they split the airdrop with fewer swaps, people who spam wallets will receive a disproportionate amount of tokens. This is not good for the future of the project, so the project decided to set 7 swaps as a requirement.

You can look into the details of the Ref Finance Airdrop Information and also the eligible lists here: https://bit.ly/3fLoniS

Keep in mind that there are still 2 million REF tokens for the airdrop that have not been distributed yet and will be distributed in the near future. What it means is you should test the project’s features more thoroughly. When the airdrop opportunity comes again, the ones with the upper hand are the ones who have more preparation for the airdrop.

In the future, Ref Finance needs to focus on marketing. In order for its name to get out there more, Ref Finance needs to push for more promoting activities, including getting on Coingecko, Coinmarketcap, and CEX exchanges. A notable recent activity of Ref Finance is announcing its plan to integrate with Coin98 Wallet. This was a momentous decision, given the fact that Ref Finance is the first AMM DEX defi protocol on Near. The plan to cooperate with Coin98 will not only bring a large number of users to Ref Finance but also Near Protocol.

IDO Platform

Another big news from last week is that Skyward Finance has completed its second token sale. In total, 461 participants have purchased their tokens. This sale average rate was 5.07 NEAR per Skyward. 2 million NEAR, worth $5.5 million, have been deposited into the project’s treasury.