Ref Finance has finally released its Road Map for 2023. Let's take a closer look at what the DeFi protocol has planned for the year ahead.

Decentralization

In 2023, Ref Finance plans to involve more community members in shaping the product's direction, with the Ref Community DAO taking on a greater role in voting on features to be added to the second half of the Road Map. Additionally, a public feature request system will be introduced to allow anyone to submit and comment on features they would like to see on Ref.

Scheduled for Q2, Ref Widgets will make it easy for projects to integrate Ref Finance features onto their website. These widgets will include a Swap Widget for swapping to and from that project's token, a Pool Widget for adding liquidity to the project's pool, and a Farm Widget for staking on the project's farm. It will function in a similar way to embedding a tweet or YouTube video on a website.

Better utilization of liquidity

In mid-February, Ref v2, a Discretized Liquidity AMM (DLAMM), was relaunched, and the wrap-up of Ref v2 will take place in the same quarter. This will include the addition of more Ref v2 pools and farms, the inclusion of Ref v2 stats in Ref Analytics, and the final step of making the Ref v2 smart contracts 100 % open source.

Capital Efficiency

By the end of March, Ref users will be able to enjoy a pure Central Limit Order Book (CLOB) experience, integrated with Orderly's liquidity. This integration will enable users to trade tokens with the help of a trading interface similar to that of most centralized exchanges.

Ref is planning to launch lending and borrowing of fungible tokens in Q2, followed by the extension of liquidity as collateral in Q4. With this feature, liquidity providers can use their pool shares as collateral and borrow fungible tokens, thereby re-liquifying their assets while earning a share of the swap fees.

User Experience

In Q2, you will have the opportunity to use Zap Swap. For example, if you want to deposit 100 $USDC’s worth of liquidity into the $REF/$NEAR pool, you can give Zap Swap 100 $USDC, and they will give you the equivalent value of $REF/$NEAR pool shares.

In Q3, Recurring Swaps will be available, which will automate swaps to occur at regular intervals. Users can set up a schedule to swap 1 $NEAR for $REF once a day, week, or month.

Analytics

Enhanced analytics, scheduled for Q3, will provide liquidity providers and farmers with greater insight into pool and farm performance, enabling them to make more informed and data-driven investment decisions. Alongside this, Sentinels will be introduced to monitor pools, assets, and other contracts for suspicious activity, such as changes in assets metadata or significant shifts in assets balances within a pool. Depending on the type of anomaly detected, the Ref site may display a warning to users about potential issues with an asset. The team will continue to build upon Sentinels and Enhanced Analytics, developing innovative security systems and user protection features by the end of the year.

Cross-chain liquidity available

In Q2, an Enhanced Swap Pro will be introduced, which will include DEX aggregators on Aurora alongside the current Swap Pro. This integration will significantly increase the liquidity available for cross-chain swaps. Any DEXs added to these aggregators in the future will also automatically become available, further increasing liquidity.

Impact

Ref Finance is constantly striving to make it easier for users to use decentralized applications in the NEAR ecosystem, something which is further confirmed by their current Road Map. Creating and integrating new features for coss-chain swaps will bring more and more liquidity to the entire ecosystem, which will in turn have a positive impact on minimizing slippage for swaps in the ecosystem. Ref Finance has also stated that they remain committed to working with their partners in the ecosystem to make the NEAR ecosystem an even better place to decentralize your finances.