Ref Ahead: 2023 Roadmap

Before jumping into 2023, it’s worth remembering what happened in 2022. The past year was marked by volatility and deleveraging in the crypto market, with major players like FTX, 3AC, and Voyager falling. Despite these events, we believe DeFi continues to offer greater security and efficiency through trustlessness and transparency. However, the DEX market is small compared to centralized exchanges. Our focus in 2023 is to improve product user experience, security, and high-efficiency trading on DEXs, making them more competitive. Our 2023 product roadmap summarises our key areas of focus in the next 12 months to achieve these goals.

SIX PILLARS

Repetition is the First Principle of All Learning — Robert F. Bruner
Here is a reminder of our six pillars, as identified in our 2022 roadmap:

• The Future is Decentralised: Promote further decentralisation
• The Double B: Deliver Better prices and Better liquidity utilisation
• Money, Money, Money: Provide LPs with the tooling to maximise profits while mitigating risks (i.e. auto-compounding)
• Better Experience: Improve user experience
• Knowledge is power: Encourage transparency and data-driven decisions
• Bridge Them All: Reduce the gap with other chain communities

In addition to Security, which is transversal to the above pillars.

The 2022 Ref Cheat Sheet

• January 17: Single-sided staking for REF
• February: Allbridge integration
• March 18: Auto Router (Smart Routing)
• April — May: Additional stable pools added
• May 19: Swap Pro: Multi-chain Router
• June 15: Rated pools for yield-bearing tokens
• July: veTokenomics on testnet
• September 7: Wallet Selector integrated
• September 20: Ref SDK
• September 21: New, veTokenomics-ready, Farm contract released
• September 22: Transak integrated
• October 9: Defillama Yield Dashboard published
• November 22: Revenue Dashboards on Datrics
• December 20: Ref v2 Concentrated Liquidity launched

The list above is not exhaustive. Small wins are worth mentioning as well, such as a major revamp of the Ref UI, a new referral fee model, Ledger Support toggle to help with Ledger’s low memory issues, fouradditional translations (Vietnamese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish), NETH integration (MetaMask), and audits of all the smart contracts.

The Future is Decentralized

2023 will bring more involvement from those outside of the core team. For example, the Ref Community DAO will take on more of a role in shaping the direction of the product, by voting on some features that will be added to the second half of the Roadmap. Furthermore, a public feature request system will be rolled out that will allow anyone to submit and comment on features they would like to see on Ref!

Ref Widgets, scheduled for Q2, will make it easy for projects to embed Ref Finance features on their own website, similar to how a site can embed a tweet or YouTube video. For example, a Swap Widget for swapping to/from only 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.

The Double B

Better prices. Better liquidity utilisation.
Ref v2, a Discretized Liquidity AMM (DLAMM), was relaunched mid-February, and the wrap-up of Ref v2 will take place in the same quarter. This will include additional Ref v2 pools, Ref v2 farms, adding Ref v2 stats in Ref Analytics, and finally making the Ref v2 smart contracts 100% open source.

Money, Money, Money

The integration of Orderly’s liquidity, along with a pure Central Limit Order Book (CLOB) experience should be done by the end of March. This integration will allow Ref users to utilise liquidity on Orderly for trading tokens, and use a trading interface like those seen on most centralised exchanges.

Lending and borrowing of fungible tokens will be coming to Ref in Q2. This will be extended in Q4 to include Liquidity as Collateral; liquidity providers will be able to borrow fungible tokens using their pool shares as collateral, essentially re-liquifying their assets while still getting a cut of the swap fees.

Better Experience

We’ve all been in this situation: There’s a farm with juicy rewards, and you need pool shares to stake on it. However, you don’t have the pool’s tokens in your wallet, so you have to figure out how many of each token you will need, do a swap or two to get them, and then go back to the pool’s page to deposit your newly acquired tokens. There has to be a better way!

Well, there will be, in Q2, with Zap Swap! Want to deposit 100 USDC worth of liquidity into the REF/NEAR pool? Just give Zap Swap 100 USDC, and Zap Swap will give you the equivalent value of REF/NEAR pool shares in return!

Recurring Swaps, scheduled for Q3, will automate swaps so that they occur at regular intervals. For example, users will be able to set up a schedule to swap 1 NEAR for $REF once a day, week, or month.

Knowledge is Power

Enhanced analytics will give liquidity providers and farmers more insight into the performance of pools and farms, in order to help them make more informed, data-driven, decisions about their investments. That is scheduled for Q3, along with Sentinels, which will monitor pools, tokens, and other contracts for suspicious activity, like a change to a token’s metadata, or a significant shift in the balance of a pool’s tokens. Depending on the type of anomaly detected, the Ref site may display a warning to users about a potential problem with a token. The team will build upon Sentinels and Enhanced Analytics, further developing some innovative systems for security and user protection for the end of the year.

Bridge Them All!

An Enhanced Swap Pro in Q2 will add DEX aggregators on Aurora to the current Swap Pro. This will immediately increase the liquidity available for cross-chain swaps, and the liquidity of any DEXs added to these aggregators in the future will automatically become available as well!

Conclusion

In addition to our major product focuses, we have plenty of exciting features in store for the year ahead. For instance, we are expanding our wallet selector by adding additional wallets (XDEFI and HERE wallets before end of Q1), and our Fireblocks integration will be launching on mainnet soon.

Overall, we remain committed to working with our ecosystem partners to make the NEAR ecosystem an even better place to decentralise your finance. We value your input and look forward to growing the NEAR ecosystem together. Here are a few ways to reach out to us:

• Email: business@ref.finance
• Governance Forum
• Discord
• Twitter

Disclaimer

Ref Finance does not endorse or promote any of the projects, platforms or cryptocurrencies mentioned in this blogpost. Any descriptions of functionality and services provided are for information only. Ref Finance is not responsible for any loss of funds or other damages caused as a result of using the projects, platforms or cryptocurrencies described above.