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RHEA Finance
Rhea Finance is a decentralized finance (DeFi) platform built on the NEAR protocol, formed through the merger of Ref Finance and Burrow Finance. It operates as a chain-abstracted liquidity platform offering cross-chain swaps, lending, and staking powered by NEAR Intents and Rhea’s liquidity infrastructure.[1][3][2]
Overview
Rhea Finance was established following the merger of two prominent protocols on the NEAR ecosystem: Ref Finance, a leading decentralized exchange, and Burrow Finance, a top lending protocol.[4]
The merger was announced in March 2025. The primary motivation behind the consolidation was to address the challenge of fragmentation within the DeFi landscape, where users often need to interact with multiple chains, platforms, and wallets to manage assets and optimize yield strategies.[1]
The platform seeks to create a single, integrated liquidity solution accessible to users across different blockchain ecosystems, including NEAR, Bitcoin, and Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible chains. By combining the functionalities of a DEX and a lending protocol, Rhea Finance intends to enhance capital efficiency and provide a more streamlined user experience for swapping, lending, borrowing, and yield generation. The platform leverages the underlying infrastructure of the NEAR protocol.[1][2]
Rhea now operates as a chain-abstracted liquidity platform offering cross-chain swaps, lending, and staking powered by NEAR Intents and its own liquidity infrastructure. Its official site describes swaps across 24 chains and 4,000+ tokens, as well as cross-chain lending and staking.[2]
History
The merger of Ref Finance and Burrow Finance was announced on March 4, 2025, bringing NEAR’s decentralized exchange and lending protocol together as Rhea Finance.[1] On August 1, 2025, RHEA launched, consolidating the predecessor protocols’ REF and BRRR tokens into a single governance and utility token.[6]
On April 16, 2026, an exploit targeting margin trading drained Rhea’s lending protocol. According to Rhea’s post-mortem, the attack used fake-token liquidity pools and a constructed swap route to direct borrowed debt tokens through those pools, while returning negligible position tokens. This left undercollateralized positions that were liquidated, depleting the lending reserve pool. Rhea revised its initial loss estimate of about $7.6 million to approximately $18.4 million. A large portion of assets had been returned or frozen, and affected contracts were paused.[9]
In an April 22, 2026 update, Rhea estimated an approximately $400,000 remaining funding gap and committed to cover any remaining shortfall so affected users could be reimbursed. The update reported that the DEX had reopened and that NEAR margin trading was permanently discontinued.[10] On May 8, 2026, Rhea said its completed reconciliation accounted for all user balances. On May 13, 2026, it announced that lending operations had resumed under a recovery framework and with strengthened security.[5]
Key Features
RHEA Finance integrates decentralized exchange and lending capabilities into a single platform.
- Decentralized Exchange (DEX): Allows users to swap various cryptocurrency tokens and provide liquidity to earn yield.[2] The platform lists multiple trading pairs, including NEAR, wNEAR, USDC, USDt, FRAX, REF, STNEAR, PURGE, BLACKDRAGON, LONK, GEAR, SHITZU, and KAT.[2] The official site describes swaps across 24 chains and 4,000+ tokens; these figures represent the site’s stated coverage.[2]
- Lending and Borrowing: Functions as a money market where users can lend assets to earn interest or borrow assets against collateral. It is described as a money market on NEAR.[2] Margin trading features are also available.[2] The official site also describes cross-chain collateralized borrowing.[2]
- Chain Abstraction: Designed to provide a unified liquidity experience that abstracts away the complexities of interacting with different blockchain networks.[2]
- Aggregator Bridge: Facilitates the transfer of assets from various blockchain networks to the NEAR ecosystem, enabling users to access yield opportunities on NEAR with external assets.[2]
- Satoshi Ramp: Described as a mechanism for integrating Bitcoin (BTC) into the NEAR DeFi ecosystem, providing users with yield opportunities for their BTC holdings.[1]
- Yield Optimization: Aims to provide users with tools and features to optimize their yield generation strategies across different assets and protocols.[1]
- Risk Management: Incorporates features intended to enhance risk management for users engaging in lending, borrowing, and trading activities.[1]
- Cross-chain staking: The official site describes staking across chains as part of Rhea’s chain-abstracted offering.[2]
Technology
Rhea Finance is built on the NEAR protocol. The platform offers a Software Development Kit (SDK), known as the Rhea SDK, to allow developers to build applications on top of the Rhea infrastructure.[2]
In NEAR Intents execution, users specify an outcome and competing solvers submit quotes. A verifier contract on NEAR checks and settles a fill. Rhea Lending can provide on-demand liquidity to solvers: solver capital that is not being used earns lending yield, is deployed when fills require liquidity, and returns to lending after execution.[2][5]
Tokenomics
Following the merger, the native tokens of the predecessor protocols, $REF (Ref Finance) and $BRRR (Burrow Finance), were consolidated into a single primary token for Rhea Finance, designated as $RHEA. The NEAR Foundation announced the launch of $RHEA on August 1, 2025, consolidating REF and BRRR as Rhea’s utility and governance token.[6]
Rhea’s tokenomics documentation describes xRHEA as non-transferable staked RHEA. It is used for gas, boosts yield, earns oRHEA incentives, and is relevant to reputation and conversion multipliers. oRHEA is a non-transferable, activity-based incentive earned through ecosystem activity and campaigns; it can be converted to RHEA under mechanics influenced by on-chain reputation, xRHEA balance, and holding duration.[7]
The official site says that 100% of DEX revenue is directed to RHEA buybacks.[2]
Partnerships
Rhea Finance has established partnerships with various entities within the blockchain ecosystem. Listed partners include:
- NEAR[2]
- Blocksec[2]
- Slowmist[2]
- Immunefi[2]
- OKX[2]
- Frax[2]
- Coin98[2]
- Rainbow Bridge[2]
- Sweat Economy[2]
- Pikespeak[2]
- Cede.hub[2]
CoW Protocol announced an order-routing integration with Rhea Finance on August 10, 2026. The integration supports same-chain trades and execution on Rhea’s cross-chain DEX, with order routing and slippage protection.[8]
On October 30, 2026, Rhea announced a partnership with HackenProof to launch a bug bounty program for researchers to identify vulnerabilities in RHEA smart contracts.[3]
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