Near Defi Tutorial by Defi Dad

Before we get started, this is not a recommendation or endorsement to buy NEAR or REF.

Today’s post will cover one of the most tried and true DeFi farming setups but with a less talked about L1 and a newer AMM.

Over the last few months, we’ve covered the power of liquid staking--earning staking rewards with PoS assets like stETH by Lido, bLUNA on Anchor, mSOL by Marinade, pATOM by pSTAKE, and now we’ve got yet another new liquid staking tool for those who are long NEAR. If you’re new to NEAR, it is “a development platform built on a sharded, proof-of-stake, layer-one blockchain designed for usability.” NEAR has been in development for many years and oddly enough, has been slower to see its popularity grow among the explosion of DeFi and liquidity mining the last 2 years. For those who are long NEAR or wanting exposure to NEAR, the native asset powering the NEAR platform, stNEAR by Meta Pool provides similar benefits to what we see with stETH by Lido.

While stNEAR is earning about 11.6% APY for NEAR stakers, there’s an AMM called Ref.finance that launched on NEAR back in August 2021, and now has grown to just over $100M in TVL. Given the less mature DeFi community on NEAR, it’s been no surprise that some of most popular money legos on Ethereum, Solana, and Terra are just becoming more liquid.

I’ve written so many times about the value of these types of protocols so I’m going to skip all the flowery fundamentals today. We have a liquid staking derivative stNEAR that we can provide liquidity for on a newer AMM and look to earn trading