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DeFi
A loan against deposits worth more than the debt, granted by code that never learns the borrower's name, and the parameters that follow from that.
10lessons
75 minreading in all
Working knowledgewhere it starts
01
Lessons in this track
01
Over-collateralized lending: how a loan is secured and closedA loan against deposits worth more than the debt, granted by code that never learns the borrower's name, and the parameters that follow from that.
7 min · Working knowledge
02
Automated market makers and impermanent loss, with the arithmeticHow a constant-product pool prices a trade, why a liquidity provider ends up short of simply holding, and the exact size of the shortfall.
8 min · Advanced
03
Where does DeFi yield come from, and who is paying it?A yield figure is a rate of change in a token balance; separating interest and fees from newly printed tokens is the whole of the analysis.
7 min · Working knowledge
04
Liquid staking: what the receipt token actually representsStaking locks an asset; liquid staking replaces the lock with a transferable claim, and the claim is a different instrument with its own failure modes.
7 min · Working knowledge
05
Restaking and the stacked slashing questionReusing staked capital to secure additional services makes the same collateral answerable to several slashing conditions at once, which is one fact, not two.
7 min · Advanced
06
On-chain derivatives: perpetual futures, funding and marginHow a contract with no expiry stays tethered to spot, who takes the other side on chain, and what happens when margin runs out.
8 min · Advanced
07
Real-world assets and tokenized treasuries, and what they are notA token representing an off-chain asset records a claim; it does not enforce one, and the difference determines everything about how these instruments behave.
7 min · Working knowledge
08
Oracles: the most common single point of failure in DeFiA contract cannot see a price; it can only read one that somebody wrote down, and almost every protocol inherits the failure modes of that process.
8 min · Advanced
09
Bridges, wrapped tokens and the record of bridge exploitsNothing crosses between chains: assets are immobilized on one side and a claim is issued on the other, which is only as sound as its guard.
8 min · Working knowledge
10
Composability: why one failure propagates through DeFiOpen contracts call each other without permission, which is the source of the sector's flexibility and of the way one fault reaches everything at once.
8 min · Advanced
10 lessons
How networks work
10 lessons
Institutional access and regulation
10 lessons
Market structure
10 lessons
Protocol economics
12 lessons
Risk
8 lessons
Stablecoins and payments
10 lessons
Start here
10 lessons
Supply and issuance
6 lessons
Using this site
12 lessons