DeFi basics: Definitions and tutorials to strap to your tool belt as you explore the frontier of finance.

What is Decentralized Finance?
Decentralized finance, or DeFi, is the ecosystem of financial applications being built with blockchain technology and without banks. Money lives in cages: Each financial system is locked within its own

Getting Started With DeFi
In this guide we’ll be helping you take your first steps into the boundless world of Decentralized Finance, better known as DeFi. DeFi is a growing movement which has the

Ethereum DeFi Projects Map
DeFi is a growing ecosystem of protocols and applications, which are delivering value to several thousands of users, and transacting the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars in digital

DeFi Security 101
This article was written together with Ledger, a hardware wallet and application to securely buy, sell, exchange, stake, lend & manage your crypto. Owning crypto is a path made of

What is a Dapp and How Does it Use Smart Contracts?
dApps or decentralized applications are applications powered by a public blockchain protocol like Ethereum. When you build a dApp on Ethereum, you’re programming a simple set of rules for an

Common Uses of DeFi: Lending, Borrowing, Trading, and Stablecoins
In DeFi, the possibilities of what can be built to replace legacy finance are endless, but there are a few use cases that every newcomer to DeFi will want to

How Does DeFi Differ From CeFi?
There are 3 major differences to know between CeFi and DeFi. 1) Centralized finance (CeFi) refer to crypto banking companies like Coinbase, Binance, and Huobi, which are owned by a

DeFi Wallets and Self-Custody: How to be 100% in Control
In DeFi, your money becomes empowered. You can store it, lend it, trade it, zap it, and track it real-time. It’s a bit like a game but at the heart

What Does “Permissionless” Mean and Why Does it Matter?
When you use a DeFi application, there’s no sign-up with your email and name, there’s no ID required, and in most cases, there’s no restriction on your geographical location. All

Trust, Intermediaries and Censorship
When you use a DeFi application, it’s powered by hardcoded rules. The idea is that these rules provide users with the ability to do powerful but predictable things with their

KYC and Why It’s Not Needed in DeFi
While crypto has been around over 10 years, the most popular apps until the last year have been centralized crypto exchanges. These centralized exchanges like Binance and Coinbase do billions

What is Interoperability and Why is it Important?
Interoperability happens when two or more systems can communicate and exchange value. The best way to understand interoperability is to see the early success stories of it in action. Today

How Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Other Blockchains Fit Within DeFi
DeFi today can be found mostly flourishing on Ethereum. New applications launch faster than you can keep up with.That empire is only going to grow. The network effects of developers

Top Tools to Get Started with DeFi
In DeFi, our money is controlled by us, the user, while the apps we use are created by different teams who share one common thread, the blockchain. In most cases

Top Teams Building DeFi
DeFi is constantly changing, with new projects popping up seemingly every single day. This is by no means an exhaustive list. It’s just the tip of the iceberg. We went

What is MakerDAO and How Does DAI Work?
MakerDAO is exactly what it sounds like –it’s a DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization and its purpose is to make DAI. DAI is a digital dollar backed by locked up

Lending and Borrowing with Compound and Aave
If you’ve read our post on Maker, you now understand the granddaddy of all DeFi — Maker DAO.In this post, we’re going to cover an advancement of this lending and

Decentralized Perpetuals Trading with dYdX and MCDEX
Perpetuals are a swap product for traders to hold exposure indefinitely, versus having to roll their futures positions. It was BitMEX who solved this problem with what’s now popularly known

What are Automated Market Makers Like Uniswap
Automated Market Makers (AMM) are one of the most popular DeFi applications today. An AMM is a decentralized asset trading pool that enables market participants to buy or sell cryptocurrencies.

DEX Aggregators; The Search Engines of DeFi Trading
One of the most important new tools to master in DeFi is trading on decentralized exchanges (DEXs) on Ethereum. For those trading tokens powered by Ethereum (ERC20 tokens), it’s important

What is Yield Farming and Liquidity Providing
Yield farming is one of the many memes that was created by the DeFi community. While it’s a term that gets tossed around loosely, there’s a narrower criteria to define

What is yearn.finance
Yearn.finance automates yield earning. It started out as a “yield bouncer” called iearn.finance, automatically moving stablecoins like DAI from one lending protocol to the next across Compound, dYdX, Aave, and

DEXs vs CEXs
CeFi vs DeFi. Centralized exchanges (CEXs) versus decentralized exchanges (DEXs). Trading on CEXs involves trusting a centralized company with your private keys and information. It also often means a faster

What’s Layer 1 vs Layer 2?
If you have tried DeFi recently, you have probably experienced the frustrations of high transaction fees. As the demand for DeFi services on Ethereum have increased, it has become “normal”

Algorithmic Stablecoins
Stablecoins on Ethereum boast an estimated $20B in liquidity (according to usdonethereum.com) and they show no signs of slowing down in growth. Stablecoins, examples of which include DAI, sUSD, USDC

Trading Every Asset Class with DeFi Derivatives
A derivative is a big word created by Wall St that simply means: a financial security with a value that is reliant upon, or derived from, an underlying asset or

DeFi On-Chain Options
Options are yet another money lego growing like crazy on Ethereum, with growing liquidity on Hegic and Opyn. Options, like the name implies, give traders the option to buy or

DeFi Insurance and how Nexus Mutual Works
As more apps and protocols launch, and more money pours into DeFi, it’s important that DeFi investors can mitigate the risk of losing their funds. With great power, comes great

Risks of DeFi
You can lose 100% of your money in any DeFi app or protocol. So above all else, apply a simple rule of thumb to help mitigate this risk: don’t deposit

Top 10 DeFi Resources
There are countless resources that can provide crucial information and education to help you along in your DeFi journey. These (in no particular order or ranking) are our Top 10

What is Gas and How to Save on Fees?
“Gas” is the ETH required to power every transaction on Ethereum. Gas is a term that was coined to describe the ETH (ether) required to transact on the Ethereum network.

The Future of DeFi
The biggest question in DeFi is always: What’s next? And that’s what’s so magnificent about this new world of DeFi: nobody knows, but whatever it is, it’s coming fast and