Ref Finance is a community-led, multi-purpose DeFi platform built on NEAR Protocol.

Ref takes full advantage of NEAR’s low fees, one-to-two second finality, and WebAssembly-based runtime (hello, Rust smart contracts!).

In addition to the advantages of being built on top of NEAR, Ref Finance provides:

* Multiple pools in one contract
* Atomic transactions
* Customisable pool fee

## Features

↔️ **Trade**

Trade tokens with our automated market maker (AMM) exchange

**💰 Pool**

Provide liquidity and earn revenue from swap fee

**🌾 Farm**

Stake LP tokens into farms and earn rewards in return

**🌈 Stake**

Stake REF tokens to earn more REF tokens, by earning fees generated by the protocol

## Genesis

Ref Finance was initially created by Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of NEAR Protocol. The first commit on Github was made on March 9, 2021.&#x20;

Following the deployment of the application in April 2021, Proximity Labs, a research and development company focused on NEAR, received a grant from the NEAR Foundation to bootstrap and scale Ref Finance.

Early June 2021, Proximity set up the Ref Finance DAO. DAO members were selected based on their value, contribution, and activity across the board (mainly Telegram and Discord).

## Tokenomics

### **General Information**

REF is a Governance token that also rewards its holders with a protocol revenue sharing model.

* Token name: Ref Finance
* Ticker: REF
* Fungible Token Contract: token.v2.ref-finance.near
* Fungible Token Standard: NEP-141
* Fixed Supply: 100,000,000
* IDO: 2,500,000 auctioned via Skyward Finance (July 26–31, 2021)

### **Token Allocation**

| Categories | Allocation | Release Schedule |
| ------------------------------ | ---------- | --------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| Liquidity Incentives | 60% | Year 1: 25%Year 2: 18.3%Year 3: 11.7%Year 4: 5% |
| Community Contributions | 20% | N/A |
| Development Fund | 10% | 4-year linear release |
| Early Users Airdrop | 1% | 3-month vesting with 3-month cliff |
| Future Airdrop(s) | 2% | TBD |
| IDO (Skyward Auction) | 2.5% | 1-week auction |
| REF Token Liquidity Provisions | 2.5% | N/A |
| Strategic Airdrop | 2% | N/A |

### **Token Utility**

1. **Speculation**: Users who buy REF tokens with the objective to sell at a higher price in the future
2. **Earning protocol revenue**: Users who stake REF tokens to earn fees generated by the protocol
3. **Pooling**: Users who provide liquidity with any REF token pairs earn swap fee from the associated pool(s)
4. **Farming**: Users who stake their LP tokens into different farms, thus earning additional revenue
5. **Governance** (Under Development): Users who stake xREF to participate in the governance and vote on key proposals

## Governance

### DAO <a href="#9a14" id="9a14"></a>

The current DAO (ref-finance.sputnik-dao.near) uses SputnikDAO contract to manage its affairs.&#x20;

The DAO has two different roles:

1. **Council**: Council members can create proposals and vote. Only Council members can create proposals. If the majority of the Council confirms or rejects a proposal, that decision will stand
2. **Community**: Community members can vote on proposals. If the majority of the Community confirms or rejects a proposal, that decision will stand. For most proposals, the Council will defer to the Community's decision, and refrain from voting

### Core Values 

Beyond voting power, anyone in our community is welcomed and encouraged to participate in the activities of the project, including, but not limited to:

* **Project Management**: planning, project methodology, and documentation
* **Product Testing**: unit test and end-to-end test
* **Product Strategy**: benchmark, market analysis, and go-to-market plan
* **User Support and Moderation**
* **PR and Communication**

In addition to proactiveness, Community members shall:

* Challenge project proposals
* Share their opinion about different matters raised by the Community
* Be proactive and act in the protocol’s best interests
* Exercise independent judgement (Community members should not be delegates who simply implement the commands of other parties)
* Exercise their voting right
* Participate in the Community calls and meetups

Ref.Finance is the premier bluechip DeFi project of the NEAR Ecosystem.

An Overview of Ref Finance

[Sender](https://awesomenear.com/senderwallet), the browser plug-in wallet for NEAR ecosystem, has officially announced a partnership with [Ref Finance](https://awesomenear.com/ref-finance).

Sender has already started the integration with ref.finance and expects to complete it by mid-March. At that time, NEAR users can experience a seamless integration and smooth experience with the browser Wallet and DEX.

Kenny, the founder of Sender Labs, said he is happy to be working with Ref and that the combination of the plug-in Wallet and DEX will allow users to have a better trading experience while keeping their assets safe.

Joe, the Frontend Lead developer of Ref Finance, said that Ref is the largest DEX in the NEAR ecosystem and the first DEX to integrate a browser-based plug-in wallet, with more features in development.

Sender, the browser plug-in wallet for NEAR ecosystem, has officially announced a partnership with Ref Finance.

Sender Announces Partnership With Ref Finance

With PembRock Finance’s early token sale now underway, we thought it would be a good time to give you some more info in anticipation of our upcoming release!
 
PembRock Finance is proud to be part of the NEAR blockchain ecosystem, as we not only see its current potential, but also opportunities for further growth as more products get introduced. As the first leveraged yield farming project on NEAR, we hope to play our part in bringing greater liquidity to the blockchain, while rewarding the expanding NEAR community with great rewards!

## What does this mean for farmers?

With PembRock and Ref Finance, farmers can borrow any available coin and create a leveraged position, meaning larger rewards. Lenders can also provide liquidity to these farmers, getting great interest with minimal risk on cryptocurrencies such as stablecoins. Then there is auto reinvesting —PembRock users can get compounded rewards by using auto reinvesting in their positions!
 
As set out in the second milestone on our roadmap, we are integrating with Ref Finance, linking its liquidity and farming pools to our protocol.

## What is Ref Finance?

Ref Finance is a community-driven, expanding set of DeFi products built around a core AMM. It is at once a decentralized exchange, lending platform, synthetic asset issuer, and much more.
 
Ref Finance benefits from the one to two second finality and cheap transactions inherent to the NEAR blockchain (just $0.005 per swap). This puts Ref Finance pretty much on par with centralized exchanges, helping bring greater legitimacy and trust to decentralized finance. 
 
Best of all, NEAR’s Rainbow Bridge to Ethereum means that traders can currently utilize ERC-20 assets from Ethereum on NEAR, with other bridges in development for BSC, Polygon, and Cosmos.

## PembRock and Ref Finance

In the next month, the first token pair from our project will be introduced on Ref Finance, giving greater value for holders of the versatile PEM token. With this integration, we hope to give a boost to Ref Finance and every farmer, while also establishing our credentials as the go-to leveraged yield farming project, even for those who have never transacted on NEAR protocol before.
 
Plenty of more news to come which we will share with you when the time is right, so stay tuned by following our social media:
[@PembrockFi](https://twitter.com/PembrockFi)

With PembRock Finance’s early token sale now underway, we thought it would be a good time to give you some more info in anticipation of our upcoming release!

Farm with PembRock and Ref Finance

## Lending is NEAR

After months of building, testing, and auditing since the initial announcement, we are excited to share that Burrow, the first lending protocol on NEAR, is finally ready to launch on mainnet.

To celebrate mainnet coming very soon™, Burrow is partnering up with the coveted Mr. Brown project to issue 140 Mr. BRRR NFTs for a very special NFT voucher program.

## Meet Mr. BRRR

A money hungry groundhog at heart, Mr. BRRR knows how borrowing and lending works better than anyone. That is why he brought Burrow to NEAR — to show his fellow hogs how money markets are done.

For this special NFT voucher program, we present to you the Mr. Brown-ified version of Mr. BRRR.

## Terms and Conditions

- There will be a total of 140 Mr. BRRR NFTs issued
- **1 Mr. BRRR NFT = 100 $BRRR** (native token of Burrow)
- Minting goes live every Wednesday for three weeks, starting on March 23rd, 2022. The NFTs will be minted on Paras.
- After minting, the NFTs can be traded on [Paras](https://paras.id/collection/mr-brrr-nft-vouchers-by-burrownftnear)
- After a 1 month trading period, each Mr. BRRR NFT can be redeemed for 100 $BRRR by sending the NFTs to the [Burrow DAO](https://app.astrodao.com/dao/burrow.sputnik-dao.near) — no matter the floor price
- Burrow has a pre-mining period of $BRRR for 1 month from mainnet launch. NFT redeeming will be available soon after $BRRR becomes transferable. (Dates TBA)
- All verfied NFT holders will be deemed an OG in the [Burrow community](https://discord.gg/E6p8mDKp).
- The NFTs redeem period lasts until December 31st, 2022.

## Mint Details

- Mint Price: **5 $NEAR**
- Platform: [Paras (burrownft.near)](https://paras.id/collection/mr-brrr-nft-vouchers-by-burrownftnear)

## Mint Dates

- March 23, 2022 : 1st batch mint (40 editions) + secondary market on Paras
- March 30, 2022: 2nd batch mint (40 editions)
- April 6, 2022: final batch mint (25 editions)
- After $BRRR unlock (TBA)~ December 31, 2022: NFT redeem period

## Distribution

- Non-whitelist Minting: 90
- Burrow Discord Whitelist: 15
- Ref Finance: 20
- Paras: 5
- Mr. Brown: 5
- NEARweek: 5

Join the [Burrow Discord](https://discord.gg/E6p8mDKp) for a chance to win weekly whitelist opportunities. And follow our partners’ Twitter accounts to participate in the Mr. BRRR NFT giveaways!

After months of building, testing, and auditing, we are excited to share that Burrow, the first lending protocol on NEAR, is finally ready to launch on mainnet.

Get a Mr. BRRR NFT Voucher, 100% Buyback Guarantee

We are excited to announce that WePiggy is coming to Aurora, an EVM layer 2 running on NEAR. WePiggy will join the growing ecosystem of DeFi projects building on Aurora, offering a secure, powerful, and user-friendly cross-chain lending protocol to the Aurora and NEAR community.

Aurora is a solution that allows to execute Ethereum contracts in a more performant environment — NEAR blockchain, a modern layer-1 blockchain which is fast (2–3 second transaction finalization), scalable, and carbon neutral.

WePiggy focuses on building an open-source, non-custodial crypto-asset lending market protocol that helps users realize asset appreciation and maximize utilization across many blockchain networks. On the premise of giving priority to funding security, WePiggy actively creates a more diverse lending market, optimizes the execution efficiency of smart contracts, and expands more dimensions of the business logic. Under the WePiggy multi-chain deployment plan, WePiggy is covering Ethereum, OEC, BNB Chain, Polygon, HECO, Arbitrum, Optimism, Moonriver, Harmony, Oasis and innovative public and Layer-2 networks.

## WePiggy + Aurora

WePiggy core development team will propose a specific plan for WePiggy to be deployed on Aurora.
If the governance proposal has been passed, WePiggy will be officially deployed on Aurora and the liquidity mining program will be launched accordingly.

Aurora will contribute to the building of DeFi infrastructures, including trading liquidity, lending liquidity building and price-feed integration, etc. To eliminate the systemic risk of WePiggy protocol as much as possible.

Aurora will also provide its marketing resource to WePiggy, to bring more new users to the WePiggy protocol.
Besides, more marketing events between WePiggy and Aurora are on the way.

> “Participating in the ecosystem of NEAR is an important part of our multi-chain deployment plan. The launch on the Aurora can undoubtedly get traffic support from the Aurora & NEAR community, gain greater influence, user base and capital scale, and increase WePiggy’s industry reputation and brand value. ”

> – Ron, Zheng, Founder and CEO of WePiggy

We are excited to announce that WePiggy is coming to Aurora, an EVM layer 2 running on NEAR.

WePiggy Is Coming to Aurora, Bring Multi-Chain Lending Protocol to NEAR

Do you want more?

More is $NEAR. $NEAR is now.

Aurigami is proud to announce that we have received a $2M DeFi rewards grant in $NEAR from Proximity Labs!🥳

If Christopher McCandless from Into the Wild has taught us anything, it’s that “happiness is only real when shared”, and who better to share this joy than you. As a token (hehe) of appreciation for our lovely community, we will be sharing the love of $NEAR in the form of *EXTRA YIELDS* for all of you!

## More is $NEAR 🔥🔥🔥

$NEAR incentives will be distributed to the Deposit + Borrow slots of USDC.

Users who deposit/borrow USDC on Aurigami will be entitled to receiving TRIPLE YIELDS (Deposit APY + $PLY + $NEAR)!

Our goal has always been to grow the much-needed liquidity on Aurora and boost the ecosystem’s growth. As one of the most liquid crypto assets, we believe USDC has the highest potential to help grow Aurora.

From a user’s perspective, more of you can benefit more from this targeted incentive! From a protocol’s perspective, it’s more strategic to target the asset with the highest growth potential, which is incidentally the asset with (potentially) the most idle funds in Aurora.

## So how much is more $NEAR?

In celebration of this joyous occasion, APYs will be BOOSTED with extra $NEAR reward from Mar. 16, 10:00PM UTC+8 to Mar. 23, 10:00PM UTC+8.

During this period, $200,000 worth of $NEAR (valued at the time of writing) will be distributed to the depositors and borrowers of USDC.

## Juicy Yields 🧃

With the injection of $NEAR incentives into the USDC pool, you might encounter some odd but GOOD scenarios with the Deposit and Borrow APY:

⚠️ Note: The following scenarios DO NOT take into account $PLY incentives, which when taken into consideration will LOWER the borrow APY and INCREASE the deposit APY.

⭐⭐⭐

### Scenario 1 — Deposit APY > Borrow APY for USDC

THIS IS GOOD.

Having a higher deposit APY than borrow APY means that the yield you earn from depositing is more than the interest you have to pay back on your loans.

This scenario is fantastic for recursive depositing and borrowing, since you can basically “borrow for free” to farm more incentives.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

### Scenario 2 — Negative Borrow APY for USDC

THIS IS GOOD. THIS IS VERY GOOD.

A negative borrow APY means that we’re essentially PAYING YOU to borrow, so borrow on fellow Aurigamists.

Why is this possible? The $NEAR rewards you will earn exceeds the interest you have to pay on your loans. And this is without taking into account $PLY incentives, which will push it even lower!

So what are you waiting for? Deposit and borrow now when APYs are the juuuuuiciest and incentives at the highest! 😋
Thanks to all of you, both Aurigami and Aurora are on the cusp of greatness, and this is all without the primary sale of $PLY yet!
So anon, who wants to get paid for borrowing?

Aurigami is proud to announce that we have received a $2M DeFi rewards grant in $NEAR from Proximity Labs!

Aurigami's USDC pool APY boosted with NEAR incentive!

Hello, Community (world),

Our team is excited to announce that we are cleared to launch, [GalacticWay](https://awesomenear.com/galacticway) will be live today — a next-generation NFT marketplace on the $NEAR blockchain — GalacticWay was born out of necessity, to bring the first NFT marketplace to the NEAR ecosystem that addresses a specific customer pain, access to curated collections of NFTs, on a network that is positioned for large-scale adoption, scale, and mainstream activation. Our team firmly believes that this will be the year that NFTs, and more specifically NEAR becomes mainstream.

**More about the platform itself**

The GalacticWay marketplace shares many of the core features of the predominant marketplaces on Solana and Ethereum, such as MagicEden or Opensea. From the Home page, users have access to trending, upcoming, and new drops, highlighting the top mover as our banner image on the home page. Community members will also have access to growing Stats features, that provide an overview of the top collections that can be filtered by highest list price, to lowest. Community members also can see the corresponding floor price, % of volume, volume, avg price, and more, which can be filtered by date-range.

Our goal is to be product-oriented and listen to our community. The long-term vision for the marketplace will ultimately be determined by the feedback we receive and solicit. Our goal is to further strengthen our focus on community by providing industry-leading support resolution, with a strong approach to content that will help keep engagement high and address specific trending topics across all channels, Discord, Twitter, etc.

Our system is being developed by our cross-functional team of founders, engineers, designers, marketers, and product managers, all working towards a shared goal and vision for this product, and developing a community around our work and the marketplace itself. Our team is located primarily in Switzerland and The United States.

**Why $NEAR?**

Near was first conceptualized as a high-performance network built for enterprise-grade scale — In 2018, their original mandate was to deploy the MainNet, achieved in Oct 2020. Since the focus has been on the continued growth of the ecosystem and innovative changes to the network. The most noteworthy feature is the Rainbow-Bridge, allowing for cross-chain communication between assets, ETH, 🔁 NEAR — $NEAR solves for many use cases that make competing layer-1 solutions less scalable, and therefore less appealing to enterprise institutions and organizations, and the mass-market.

Some recent highlights and innovations in the web3 space — Cross-chain portability through Aurora’s EVM and Aurora Bridge, allows for cross-chain value transfer of ETH and ERC-20 tokens — To Rubic, that recently shipped their multi-chain swap protocol allowing users to swap, or exchange Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche, Fantom, Polygon, and many more. The innovations are occurring rapidly, just keeping up can be dizzying. Like with anything, the best results come from a continued focus on a singular goal, and in our case, that goal is to introduce an NFT marketplace on a scalable user-friendly blockchain, $NEAR.

The world of blockchain is still somewhat ethereal to the general public with less than 20% of the US population having any true understanding of NFTs as an asset. Most of the general public and more specifically the US investment community, can see the intrinsic value of a store of digital value, which logically makes sense, a digital currency, but a jpg? It’s much harder for older demographics to see the utility and intrinsic value of an NFT. Our team sees this as an opportunity. Selling the general public on the overall utility of NFTs is something the entire industry needs to take on to ensure further growth and scale for generations to come. All of these customer problems can be viewed as opportunities, and GalacticWay will be positioned to capture some of its market shares.

Thank you letter from the team

We appreciate you, fam, for taking the time to learn about GalacticWay and $NEAR.

Our team is actively hiring, so please reach out to us if this is a project that you would like to work on — we need people with a shared vision to help our team control outcomes and continue building a great product and community–jobs@galacticway.io
If you want to follow along and be the first to know when we go live go follow us on [discord.gg/galacticway](http://discord.gg/galacticway) or [twitter.com/galacticwaynft](http://twitter.com/galacticwaynft) or come visit us at [galacticway.io](https://galacticway.io)

Our team is excited to announce that we are cleared to launch, GalacticWay will be live today — a next-generation NFT marketplace on the $NEAR blockchain.

Launching Galaticway on the NEAR Protocol

Web3 users looking for an easy bridge between fiat (currencies like the US Dollar and the Euro) and crypto needn’t wait any longer. [NearPay](https://awesomenear.com/nearpay), the first debit card and payments widget in the NEAR ecosystem, now bridges fiat and the crypto world in one seamless user experience. 

Launched in late 2021 by Switzerland-based Kikimora Labs, NearPay announced its debit card wait list in early March. NearPay initially hoped to attract 1,000 users to its wait list, but had more than 18,000 in under a week. 

“We hoped that people would welcome our card product, but we definitely didn’t expect that so many people would show interest,” said Ilya Romanov, Chief Marketing Officer at NearPay. “We highly appreciate the support of the community. And now we are working hard to deliver a product that people are waiting for.”

## How the NearPay card works

Set to release later this year, NearPay is a debit card that comes as both a physical card and a mobile-based app. NearPay offers a number of features for consumers, developers, and merchants to make instant transactions and payments using their preferred cryptocurrency, including NEAR. 

“You will see no difference between crypto and fiat payments,” reads the NearPay website. “Simple. Fast. Both directions.”

NearPay also allows users to track their spending through the app, and offers world-class security to keep accounts safe. Though some particulars are still in the works, the NearPay card will support 3DSecure and is already secured through Verified by Visa. There will also be features such as spending limits, with the full feature set becoming available by the end of March or early April. 

## A seamless Web3 gateway 

The NearPay team believes that the crypto debit card will be amongst the easiest ways to dive into crypto, making it a seamless part of daily life. 

Consumers can top up their NearPay card balances, and use it to make purchases immediately. “The cards will be NEAR-oriented but support other cryptocurrencies as well,” says Ivan Ilin, Chief Operating Officer at NearPay. 

NearPay offers several tools to developers interested in using the card for their apps and projects. To get started, NearPay offers a plug-and-play widget, simple documentation, webhooks and APIs, and a developer console. 

“For developers, we provide a simple API with an SDK,” says Ilin. “The integration is possible with a website or a mobile application. We provide a merchant dashboard where one can see all the transaction statistics.”

NearPay also helps onboard traditional businesses into the global Web3 ecosystem. The team built a payment gateway for merchants with no transaction or setup fees, allowing businesses to accept crypto for all of their goods and services, while a handy dashboard allows businesses to see data on payments, invoices, and more. 

“For businesses, we support two scenarios: fiat-to-crypto to a user’s wallet and fiat-to-crypto to a merchant’s wallet for a certain order,” Ilin explains. “We work with NFT marketplaces, DeFi projects, and many others.”

## Countries supporting NearPay 

The NearPay widget is currently covered in 56 countries and supports 27 currencies. The NearPay team is currently working on adding more supported countries and currencies, as well as making the transaction fee lower for the users.

“Our first cards will be made for Europe,” says Ilin. “But we have plans to cover all of the countries, including the United States and Asia.”

To see the full list of countries currently supporting NearPay, visit Kikimora Labs’ Notion website.

Web3 users looking for an easy bridge between fiat and crypto needn’t wait any longer. NearPay, the first debit card and payments widget in the NEAR ecosystem, now bridges fiat and the crypto world in one seamless user experience. 

Introducing NearPay: the First Bridge to Fiat Debit Card on NEAR

## NEAR and The Graph partner to bring Indexing and Querying to the NEAR blockchain 

Developers building applications on NEAR will be able to build subgraphs (open APIs), and index blockchain data more efficiently.

The Graph is excited to announce an official integration plan with NEAR, expanding the decentralized indexing network of NEAR’s infrastructure. The Graph currently supports Ethereum and IPFS. This partnership will support developers to build powerful applications on NEAR using The Graph, and enable developers from all supported ecosystems to explore querying of subgraphs (open APIs) for data across different blockchains. Subgraphs exist for applications like Uniswap, Synthetix, AAVE, Gnosis, Balancer, Foundation, and many others. 

The Graph is the indexing and query layer of the decentralized web. Indexing is a way of structuring and categorizing data so it can be easily searched for and queried by users. Developers build and publish open APIs, called subgraphs, that applications can query using GraphQL. The Graph solves the problem of centralized data indexing by building a decentralized protocol for indexing blockchain data, users no longer have to trust teams to operate servers and developers can deploy to reliable public infrastructure they don’t have to manage. 

## Growing the Open Web with The Graph

NEAR is a decentralized application platform that is secure enough to manage high value assets like money or identity and performant enough to make them useful for everyday people, putting the power of open technologies in their hands. It is built atop a public proof-of-stake blockchain, which combines the scalability that is needed to drive the Open Web with the common-sense usability that is needed to make it successful.

“NEAR is excited to work with The Graph ecosystem. The Graph Protocol provides essential infrastructure for developers to build and query required representations of blockchain data. Tools like The Graph empower NEAR developers to build decentralized applications faster, which will attract more builders and users to the Open Web,”  said **Illia Polosukhin**, NEAR Co-Founder. 

Eva Beylin, Director of The Graph Foundation added, “We’re excited about NEAR being one of the first multi-blockchain expansions for The Graph, enabling developers to build more interoperable dapps within the Web3 ecosystem.”

The partnership will empower NEAR’s ecosystem builders to build with a truly decentralized indexing layer and allow them to collaborate with The Graph’s network of developers. Furthermore, it provides a solution to composability issues in blockchain by creating decentralized APIs that serve data from a number of different chains.

The Graph aims to grow overall Web3 development and help developers build interoperable applications. The Integration with NEAR will accelerate both projects’ goal of ‘Opening the Web’. 

## About The Graph

The Graph is a protocol and decentralized network for querying and indexing blockchain data. At The Graph, our mission is to make serverless applications possible and to make building on Web3 accessible to anyone. Before NEAR, The Graph was integrated with many applications on Ethereum and IPFS that use subgraphs for retrieving data. To date, over 8,000 subgraphs have been deployed by over 10,000 active developers for applications, such as Uniswap, Synthetix, Aragon, Gnosis, Balancer, Livepeer, DAOstack, AAVE, Decentraland, and many others.

The Graph Foundation invites developers, researchers and community members alike to apply to The Graph Grants Program. Anyone contributing to supported blockchains can apply for a grant for Protocol Infrastructure, Tooling, Decentralized Applications or Community Building. The Foundation is aiming to distribute up to ~25M GRT in grants in The Graph ecosystem in 2021.The Graph would also love to welcome you to be Indexers, Curators and/or Delegators on The Graph’s mainnet. Join The Graph community by introducing yourself in The Graph Discord for technical discussions, join The Graph’s Telegram chat, or follow The Graph on Twitter! The Graph’s developers and members of the community are always eager to chat with you, and The Graph ecosystem has a growing community of developers who support each other.

NEAR Protocol and Mask Network will cooperate between their base layer technologies as well as on the application front.

NEAR and The Graph Partnership

We are thrilled to announce that Injective will be integrating with NEAR Protocol to expand our multi-chain trading universe.

Our mission at Injective is to create a more free and inclusive financial system through decentralization. We aim to deliver a novel decentralized multi-chain ecosystem that acts as a global and borderless network of market exposure. On Injective, users will be able to seamlessly trade assets stemming from discrete blockchain networks while retaining a vibrant Ethereum-native experience.

With our NEAR integration, Injective will be able to launch derivatives that are based on the NEAR token alongside native assets built on the NEAR blockchain. Bridging assets across Injective and NEAR will be accomplished via Aurora, which provides an Ethereum-compatible smart contract platform powered by NEAR.

## An Introduction to NEAR

NEAR is a delegated proof of stake (DPos) blockchain that utilizes sharding in order to increase scalability while also retaining a distinct set of interoperability features. In simple terms, sharding is a process via which a blockchain is partitioned into smaller components or “shards’’ which in theory helps to improve scalability since nodes would be responsible for verifying transactions that occur on specific shards rather than on the entire network.

NEAR’s unique sharding approach (Nightshade) works via processing transactions in parallel across multiple sharded chains which in theory accelerates the transaction throughput of the blockchain.

NEAR also introduces a new consensus mechanism called Doomslug which allows validators to take turns when producing blocks rather than having to compete based on individual stakes. Nightshade coupled with Doomslug work in conjunction to create a protocol that is able to achieve fast transactions with negligible fees.

The protocol is backed by a number of high-profile investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Coinbase, Multicoin, and Pantera Capital.

## Aurora: Ethereum Compatibility on NEAR

Aurora is implemented as a smart contract on the NEAR blockchain.

Aurora is composed of two core components: the Aurora Engine and the Aurora Bridge. The Aurora Engine allows for the deployment of Solidity and Vyper smart contracts while the Aurora Bridge enables the permissionless transfer of tokens and data across Ethereum and Aurora.

In essence, Aurora aims to provide a high-performance blockchain infrastructure layer powered by NEAR while providing a familiar Ethereum focused development experience.

## The Injective Integration with NEAR

We at Injective seek to pioneer a multi-chain ecosystem via which users can seamlessly access novel DeFi markets.

In pursuit of this goal, we have already started exploring integrations with promising layer one blockchains such as Polkadot and Avalanche. Currently, many of these networks offer unique benefits but remain largely siloed which inevitably leads to poor user adoption. On the other hand, Ethereum enjoys an unmatched degree of organic usage while continuing to face scalability and network congestion issues.

Injective helps to rectify the problems that seem to be pervasive within the crypto space today. Users are able to access entirely new markets across chains while still interfacing with an Ethereum-native framework.

> “We are excited to work alongside the team at Aurora and NEAR in order to bring forth a paradigm shift within the multi-chain universe. Users will be able to effortlessly move across unique derivative markets and access a wide array of novel NEAR-based markets not available elsewhere,” said Eric Chen, Injective CEO.

Our work with NEAR is an extension of our overarching mission to create a decentralized multi-chain ecosystem for financial markets. By having Aurora deploy on Injective’s Etheremint layer (the Cosmos EVM implementation), users can have access to extremely low cost token bridging. The ERC-20 token is then bridged over to the Injective Chain where trades can occur. On a frontend level, we abstract away the procedure so the user just sees one transaction rather than the intermediary steps. As a result, new decentralized markets such as NEAR/USDC spots can be made available on Injective in just a few clicks.

> “Bridges between ecosystems simplify and enrich the user experience by allowing developers to access new markets easily. We’re excited to work with Injective Protocol to enhance the interoperability between blockchains and enable the Open Web,” said Alex Shevchenko, Aurora Labs CEO.

A specific NEAR transaction would proceed as illustrated below:

## Injective: A Multi-Chain Future

We are very excited to continue building towards our vision of a truly decentralized financial system that is both free and devoid of all barriers.

The technologies built by the teams at Aurora and NEAR aid us in further expanding the capabilities offered by our protocol. Moving forward, users will have access to a robust Injective Chain that is able to work across disparate layer one networks so novel market creation and trading become more seamless than ever before.


Injective will be able to launch derivatives that are based on the NEAR token alongside native assets built on the NEAR blockchain.

Injective is Integrating NEAR Protocol to Expand our Multi-Chain Trading Ecosystem


## Aurora Provides an Ethereum Layer-2 Experience

The explosive growth of DeFi and NFTs frequently causes surges in Ethereum gas prices––a problem that economically limits the participation of many users, and prevents dApp developers from scaling their businesses to their full potential. To address these challenges, we’re proud to announce the mainnet release of Aurora, a turnkey solution for developers seeking to extend their dApps to reach additional markets.

![Aurora](https://awesome-near.s3.amazonaws.com/articles/aurora_fb.jpg "Aurora")

Aurora runs on [NEAR Protocol](https://near.org/) and takes advantage of its many unique features, including sharding and developer gas fee remuneration. Aurora consists of two core components: the **Aurora** Engine runtime, which allows for the seamless deployment of Solidity and Vyper smart contracts, and the **Aurora Bridge** (based on the [Rainbow Bridge](https://near.org/bridge) technology), providing for the permissionless transfer of tokens and data between Ethereum and Aurora. 

Aurora provides a number of enhancements for developers:

1. Aurora fees are up to 1,000x lower than Ethereum’s. For example, the cost of transferring a ERC-20 token is below $0.01, while for Ethereum (at 50 Gwei and an ETH price of $3,000), it’s around $5.40.
2. Aurora is able to host thousands of transactions per second, representing an increase of 50x compared to Ethereum 1.0. 
3. Aurora transaction finality inherits from the underlying NEAR Protocol, i.e. two NEAR blocks, or approximately two seconds—substantially lower even than a single block confirmation time of 13 seconds in Ethereum (which is not enough for transaction finality). Also, fast finality of NEAR blockchain reduces significantly the risk of frontrunning attacks.
Ecosystem growth on Aurora is future-proof: the sharding approach of the underlying NEAR Protocol provides for horizontal EVM scaling, with asynchronous communication between multiple Aurora shards.
4. Aurora offers a greener option for Ethereum users: full, uncompromising Ethereum compatibility on top of the decentralised and climate-neutral Proof-of-Stake L1 NEAR Protocol.
5. Aurora solves the current and future computational challenges of the Ethereum ecosystem, while preserving the existing engineering investment in both smart contracts and front-end code.

Aurora launches on NEAR Protocol, providing an Ethereum L2 experience. Aurora complements Ethereum & provides lower gas fees and faster transactions.

Aurora launches on NEAR Protocol


### Your NEAR Con outfit is on us

10 strongest quotes will win cool limited edition merchandise from NEAR SWAG:

To join the contest:

1. Follow [@NEARWEEK](https://twitter.com/NEARWEEK) and [@awesome_near](https://twitter.com/awesome_near).
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3. Like, retweet, and comment your first experience with #NEAR & tag 3 friends.

The winners will be drawn on Friday 17th September at 12pm CET.

### NEARWEEK News Guild

THE NEARWEEK News Guild has been producing weekly crowdsourced news from the NEARverse since April: [NEARWEEK.com](https://nearweek.com/) – Your weekly dose of news from the NEARverse.

NEARWEEK seeks to be inclusive and driven by NEARians:

We believe that we should, as fast as possible, enable NEARWEEK to become a decentralized news media platform driven and owned by a dynamic community, where profit is fairly distributed based on contributions.

We are growing to become a **self-sufficient ecosystem** where people are rewarded in a decentralized, scalable manner for contributing to the collection, curation as well as distribution of news within the NEAR ecosystem and beyond.

Whether you are new to the NEARverse or not, we are here to **empower you** as you dive deeper into the NEAR ecosystem.

Come onboard NEAR fans, let’s source & spread some NEARverse news and earn $NEAR with NEARWEEK - [Check out this step-by-step-guide](https://nearweek.medium.com/first-step-in-the-nearweek-dao-journey-2b107acc323e) on how to contribute and get started!

Explore the NEARverse with NEARWEEK

We are happy to share the details of the IDO with our community.

The sale will happen in three phases with the increasing amount of $AURORA tokens available for sale. The three chosen platforms (SmartPad, BocaChica, Skyward) are on the NEAR blockchain to develop its ecosystem. All tokens are distributed to the users only at Token Generation Event (TGE), which will happen one day after the Skyward sale. No tokens will be locked.

## IDO Process

### Basic information

- Total amount of sale: **1,000,000 $AURORA**
- Platforms for sale:
   - SmartPad (Aurora);
   - BocaChica (NEAR);
   - Skyward (NEAR).
- TGE: November 18, 13:00 UTC

### Sale Schedule

#### SmartPad Sale

Date: **November 4, 2021**
Amount: 50,000 $AURORA
Price: $1 
Accepted tokens: ETH

SmartPad sale would happen on Aurora with the price of the token $1-worth of ETH at the moment of the sale. The sale is open to everyone. The size of the check for a single user ranges from $50 to $200. The platform is working on the first come – first served basis.

#### BocaChica Sale

Date: **November 11, 2021**
Amount: 300,000 $AURORA
Price: $1 
Accepted tokens: NEAR

BocaChica sale would happen on NEAR with the price of the token $1-worth of $NEAR at the moment of the sale. The sale is open to the users who are staking at least 50 $NEAR. The size of the check for a single user ranges from $50 to $250. The platform is working on the first come – first served basis.

#### Skyward Sale

Date: November 17, 2021 
Amount: 650,000 $fAURORA 
Price: non-fixed 
Accepted tokens: NEAR

Skyward sale would happen on NEAR blockchain. The sale on Skyward will be open for 12 hours. Due to the specifics of the Skyward platform (continuous token distribution), during the sale we will sell $fAURORA – the future $AURORA token that will be automatically swapped to the $AURORA token at the TGE.

$fAURORA is a non-transferrable token, so once users get it on the Skyward sale, they are unable to do anything with it until it is swapped to $AURORA.

### Post-sale activity

All the collected proceedings of $AURORA sale will be put into liquidity pools. Aurora Labs will explore the opportunities to incentivize the pools.

Due to the nature of the blockchain and constant changes in prices, transaction queues etc., the actual implemented scenario may have minor changes.

AuroraDAO have voted to approve the process of $AURORA IDO.

Aurora DAO Approves $AURORA IDO

Today is a momentous day for the NEAR blockchain and the NEAR ecosystem: The launch of Simple Nightshade, the first step toward a fully sharded and secure blockchain. 

Since NEAR released the design for the protocol back in 2019, it was always meant to be a sharded blockchain. However, when preparing for the launch in early 2020, we realized that there was no need to launch a completely sharded network. 

Sharding is a very complex piece of technology – which we’ll be explaining in detail over the coming weeks on our Medium blog – and the network was brand new. It didn’t need to be capable of handling hundreds of millions of transactions at launch. 

Since then, the average number of daily transactions has risen to more than 300k. With the emergence of more and more projects building on NEAR, the number of transactions is only going to increase in the coming months. 

While the network is still currently using only 13% of the total capacity, we wanted to start the transition to sharding now to avoid any unpleasant surprises and ensure we can support all the applications on NEAR. Today is the start of that transition. 

Below, we’ll briefly discuss how sharding — a partitioning of the NEAR protocol — splits the work of processing transactions across many participating nodes. We’ll also offer some details on why this matters for NEAR’s booming community of developers and users.  

## Simple Nightshade

Today, the code for phase 0 was successfully deployed to the mainnet – it can take several hours or days for the code to be integrated by all network participants. 

This phase, nicknamed Simple Nightshade, will kickstart a year of changes and additions to the NEAR blockchain that when complete, will make it super-fast, incredibly secure, and capable of onboarding millions of users into the world of Web3 without skipping a beat. 

In this initial phase, we will shard the state, but not processing – meaning the blockchain will still be validated by all the network’s validators. The state will be split into four shards, significantly increasing the throughput of the network.  

Before sharding, blockchains would become congested as the project became more popular.
In this step, we have built a mechanism to split a shard into multiple parts through live upgrades, which will serve as the foundation for dynamic resharding in the future – more on that later. Meanwhile, because every shard is still validated by all validators, the safety guarantees remain the same. 

## What does this mean for users? 

It means they get the same simple, easy-to-use experience, but with increased speed and performance. One of blockchain’s biggest challenges has been scalability: how does a network grow to handle increased activity without compromising on security? Our solution to that question is Nightshade Sharding.  

While there are many new blockchains claiming to have thousands of transactions per second (TPS) and many layer 2 scaling solutions, due to their non-sharded designs, they would all hit an upper limit of what the network could handle eventually. 

NEAR’s Nightshade Sharding, on the other hand, allows NEAR Protocol to scale linearly with the number of shards, thereby having the ability to satisfy the demand for transactions as more and more users start to use NEAR. Ultimately it prepares NEAR for mass consumer adoption of billions of users.

## What does this mean for developers? 

Similar to users, developers will not have to change existing processes in order to take advantage of the increase in speed and scalability. 

Thanks to Nightshade’s homogeneous design, developers are not exposed to the details of sharding from the very beginning and they will remain unaffected by this upgrade. More specifically, internally we treat cross-contract calls the same regardless of whether two contracts are on the same shard. Therefore, developers should expect no changes to their experience of developing on NEAR.

## What does Nightshade Sharding change about the network’s performance? 

While transactions per second are often used as a measure of a network’s speed, there are many other factors that go into how quickly a blockchain can verify a transaction. 

At NEAR, network congestion, transaction finality and cost are all parts of the puzzle when it comes to assessing how ‘quick’ a network is. For reference, for token transfers, on one shard we can do 800-1000 TPS and with the upcoming sharding with four shards, we will be able to do a minimum of 2500-3000 TPS.

Ultimately, NEAR’s Nightshade is theoretically limitless (by increasing the number of shards) and can handle millions of transactions per second. 

## What comes after Phase 0? 

Early in 2022, Phase 1 will begin. In this phase, we introduce a new role: chunk-only producers, who only validate one shard. They produce chunks (shard blocks) for some specific shard and only need to run inexpensive hardware, without sacrificing the security of the network. 

The introduction of chunk-only producers also helps increase the total number of validators and improve the decentralization of NEAR as a whole. Once this phase is complete, we will have 200-400 validators and only a fraction of them (block producers) need to run more expensive hardware. We expect to deliver phase 1 in January 2022.

## Phase 2: Nightshade

In this phase, we finish the implementation of challenges, thereby eliminating the need for any validators to track all the shards. Once this step is completed, both state and processing will be fully sharded. This will also further lower the hardware requirements of running a block producer on NEAR, making the network more accessible for validators. We expect to deliver phase 2 in Q3 2022.

## Phase 3: Dynamic Resharding

After phase 2 is complete, we will have a fully functional sharded mainnet with a fixed number of shards. In phase 3, we want to expand on that and create the ability for the network to dynamically split and merge shards based on resource utilization. This will make NEAR almost infinitely scalable and resilient to short-term usage spikes. We expect to deliver phase 3 in Q4 2022.

Eventually, the network itself will dynamically adjust the number of shards based on their utilization and no validators will need to validate all the shards. 

Sharding is not the final phase of evolution for NEAR Protocol. Rather, we hope it’s just the beginning. We are simultaneously working on a number of improvements on the protocol level to build a secure, user-friendly, and scalable blockchain that can support mainstream usage and adoption. 

After sharding more and more validators could be recruited to ensure the network remains congestion free.

## An ecosystem primed for growth

In addition to the work on the protocol by NEAR Inc, NEAR Foundation is creating an ecosystem for developers, entrepreneurs, and enterprises to thrive with ambitious funding programs including $800 million worth of global ecosystem funding (now valued at $1.2 billion). 

We’re also seeing a thriving gaming, metaverse, and NFT ecosystem emerging, not to mention a DeFi ecosystem that has gone from strength to strength since mainnet launch one year ago. 

For consumers, we’re making strides forward to make the crypto experience even easier to use. From simple, language-based wallet names, to two-factor authentication, and staking baked right into the wallet. 

This is just the beginning of a period of explosive growth at every level. We can’t wait to show you what’s coming next.

## Get Started Today 

If you’re looking to build on NEAR, check out our [developer resources](https://near.org/developers/). 

If you’re an entrepreneur and want to get started, head for our [Founders space](https://near.org/developers/). 

If you’re looking to create DAOs and Guilds, check out our [Community Page](https://near.org/community/). 




NEAR launches Simple Nightshade, the first step toward a fully sharded and secure blockchain and the beginning of the mass adoption age.

NEAR Launches Nightshade Sharding, Paving the Way for Mass Adoption

Finally, we are really excited to announce that on December 7th we will set up the [Initial Distribution Offering on Skyward](https://app.skyward.finance/sale/73?r=awesome.near).

We are putting **28,000,000 $META tokens**, so we can give exposure to all the NEAR Ecosystem through a decentralized time-based auction which will be accessible to the general public.

If you want more information regarding the What and Why we are doing the IDO, please read [our previous post](https://medium.com/@meta_pool/decentralized-price-discovery-and-meta-distribution-event-on-skyward-4f28e7c812b).

## Detailed information on our IDO

- Presale: December 7th to December 14th
- Sale: December 15th to December 17th
- IDO Supply: 28,000,000 $META
- Token pair: stNEAR / $META

It is important to take into account that participants in this price discovery event will need to deposit stNEAR and exchange it for $META. We will describe the process on another post.

## Making the right partnership

Skyward will provide the right platform so the Meta Pool community can increase their exposure to the $META token.

We know that network effects are a key component of the growth of decentralized protocols and this collaboration will allow us to engage the community that has supported NEAR projects from its inception.

## What is next?

Keep staking in Meta Pool to earn $META! We will be announcing Stakers Week soon and it will have some great multipliers for those that choose to stake in our liquid staking solution. Also liquidity providers to the Liquidity Swap Pool will get an increase in multiplier rewards.

So stay tuned for more news regarding Stakers Week in our Discord and follow us in @Meta_Pool. For December we will see OIN Finance launch their DAO v3 platform which will enable deposits in stNEAR to mint their stablecoin called USDO.

The support from the NEAR Ecosystem and the Meta Pool community has been outstanding and the team is focusing on delivering value for $META and NEAR token holders. We are working round the clock to launch things on mainnet.

More partnership announcements will follow ;)

Keep on staking!


On December 7th Meta Pool will set up the Initial Distribution Offering on Skyward.

AwesomeNEAR

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