coindesk.com
Ref Finance, an automated market maker and stableswap marketplace for the NEAR blockchain, announced on Thursday that it has closed a $4.8 million round led by Jump Crypto.
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Automated market makers (AMM) are key infrastructure components for decentralised finance (DeFi), a term used to describe the financial activities carried out on blockchain without the use of conventional middlemen.
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AMMs are key to the functioning of decentralised exchanges like Uniswap. They allow users to become liquidity providers in an exchange by giving them a cut of the transaction fees as well giving out free tokens as an incentive. A stableswap marketplace is a version of an AMM specifically for stablecoins — which play an important part in any liquidity pool.
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As the NEAR blockchain grows to support multi-chain interoperability, Ref Finance will play an important role as a liquidity gateway, the company said in a release. Currently, NEAR supports the trading of ether, SOL, LUNA, CELO via asset bridges.
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Bowen Shen, co-founder at Proximity Labs, the team behind Ref Finance, in an interview with CoinDesk said that trading on NEAR costs around 1 cent a transaction and has a one-to-two second transaction finality. “Building on NEAR allow us to unlock these two essential and be a step closer to DeFi retail adoption,” he said.
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“The raise will be mainly be used to expand the team to continue building out DeFi products and services that better serve the ecosystem, the partners and the users,” he told CoinDesk. “Our investors in this round are some of the most credible VCs in the DeFi space, we consider their experience and strategic alignment the most valuable part in this funding round.”
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Before the news was released, NEAR’s token was trading at $11.40, with a $7.2 billion market cap, according to CoinGecko, while Ref Finance's token REF was trading at $1.70.