Ref Finance - tl;dr

--- --- # Ref Finance - tl;dr Welcome to TLDR with me, Ben! Today, we will briefly cover Ref.Finance - what is it? Getting started with it? and What can you do with it? One thing to note, is that I am NOT a financial advisor. The purpose of this video is educational. I'm here to explain the technology and how to use it. I will not cover things like exchange rates, pricing, or predictions. --- ## Overview Ref Finance is a community-led, multi-purpose DeFi platform built on NEAR Protocol. Inspired by Uniswap v2 and Curve Finance, Ref Finance is an automated liquidity protocol. the main ref finance website it **ref.finance** this site works like a main directory. To the docs ,analytics, community links like RefFinance's Discord server, and the main app - **app.ref.finance** We'll go through the core features of ref.finance which are **Trading**, **Pooling**, **Farming**, and **Staking**. These features can be confusing at first, so definitely check out their docs at **guide.ref.finance** if you want a deeper dive. --- ## What Does This Mean? Decentralized Exchanges, or DEXs, are notorious for terrible user experience. Ref Finance breaks this habit and offers an eay-to-use platform to engage in DeFi activities with a simplicity-first approach. --- ## How Does This Work?  Liquidity Providers (LPs) provide the liquidity, that is, the reserve of tokens you will be dipping into if your want to trade. LP's profit off of the trading fees. Anyone can trade and/or become a liquidity provider (LP) for a pool by depositing an equivalent value of each underlying token that make up the pool in return for LP tokens for that pool. Those LP tokens can be used for additional earning from a form of staking called farming. More on that later.  --- ## Trading (Swapping/Stable Swapping) Trading is made possible from liquidity pools. These are composed of equal values of 2-3 tokens . Anyone can create 2-token liquidity pools. Two ways to trade in ref finance are Swapping and StableSwap. - Swapping is trading 2 different types of tokens. - StableSwap is trading among Stable Coins - that is, those coins backed by a supply of cold hard cash. Trading is super simple, with advanced settings if you want to keep an eye on market splippage, price impact, and other details. Check out how Ref's **AutoRouter** works to give you the ability to find the best trade price. --- ## Pooling Pooling facilitates trading, ensuring that there is enough liquidity for traders. This works by providing 2-3 tokens to a pool in return for LP tokens, which can then be staked to earn additional yields through farming. Not all pools can be farmed, but you will still earn a percentage of the trading fees in proportion to your share of the pool. Users can earn a share of the trading fees by depositing tokens into the pool or adding liquidity. Users will receive LP tokens, representing their share of the pool. Providing liquidity is not without risks, so be sure to look into both **Divergence and Impermanent Loss**. --- ### Adding Liquidity This is where all the magic starts. Navigate to the **Pools** tab of **app.ref.finance** and select "View Pools" from the drop down menu. Find a pool you would like to add tokens to and click "Add Liquidity". Enter the amount you want. Finalize, and approve the transfer from your NEAR wallet. And that's it! You can also remove your liquidity, create a new pool where you customize the fees, or track your liquidity across all pools Additionally, if you want to focus on pools of stable coins, navigate to the **Sauce** menu option to see those stable coin pools. --- ## Farming Once you've added liquididty to a pool, you can often stake that liquidity through farming. This way, you'll be earning from the trade fees of your liquidity position (LP tokens mentioned earlier), and from farming rewards, which may be in the form of different tokens. To Farm, simply navigate to the **Farms** menu option, and select a pool you have liquidity in, and simply stake whatever amount of your liquidity you desire on that farm. --- ## Staking When you stake on Ref finance, you effectively exchange your REF tokens for xREF tokens. Over time, you will always earn more REF by holding xREF tokens. There is no divergence loss when you stake REF for xREF tokens. Head over to the **xREF** menu option to get started. --- ## Some things to note Never trust someone pretending to work for the "Customer Support Team". Contact Ref.Finance directly through one of their social channels if you have an issue. They are nice and heavily involved in the community, and will be happy to help. Always periodically check the url to make sure it's **app.ref.finance** --- ## Conclusions If you want a simple way to explore DeFi, then Ref.Finance is a perfect start. In combination with Aurora's rainbow bridge, you can convert NEAR into other alt coins like ERC-20 tokens that you can send to other DeFi platforms like Gate.io or Coinbase. Be sure to read the **Risks** page on **app.ref.finance** before jumping in. Thanks for watching. Please leave a comment and let us know what you think? --- ###### tags: `tldr` `content`