Rhea is the innovative evolution of NEAR’s original DeFi giants—Ref Finance and Burrow Finance—two of the leading decentralized exchange (DEX) and lending protocols on the NEAR protocol. This strategic merger and rebranding aim to establish a unified foundation to support the next wave of DeFi projects on NEAR, restoring NEAR DeFi to its rightful place.Rhea now serves as the primary liquidity hub and chain-abstraction liquidity layer for these projects, enabling protocol-level integrations and community incentive mechanisms—all built directly on NEAR’s tech stack, including chain abstraction and AI-powered frameworks.