Beginner
A Beginner's Guide to DeFi: How Decentralized Finance Works
DeFi uses blockchains and smart contracts for trading, lending, and borrowing. Learn how wallets, returns, fees, and risks fit together.
26 min read · reviewed
DeFi
Learn how decentralized finance works, from wallets and stablecoins to lending, trading, and the risks of using DeFi protocols.
Beginner
BeginnerBeginner
The five most common types of DeFi
Almost every DeFi protocol is a variation on five activities: swapping, lending, staking, issuing stable value and trading derivatives. Knowing which category a protocol belongs to tells you in advance what its main failure mode is.
5 min read · reviewed
Beginner
What is Aave?
Aave is the largest DeFi lending protocol, holding around $18 billion in deposits as of 8 September 2026. Depositors supply assets to shared pools, borrowers draw against overcollateralized positions, and an algorithm sets the rate from how much of each pool is in use.
5 min read · reviewed
Beginner
What is yield farming?
Yield farming means moving capital to wherever the combined return from fees, interest and token incentives is highest. The practice began with Compound's COMP distribution in June 2020, and the durable question it raises is whether a given yield is paid out of revenue or out of newly printed tokens.
5 min read · reviewed
Intermediate
IntermediateIntermediate
What is a curator in DeFi?
A curator decides which markets a lending vault may lend into, how much may go to each and which oracles it trusts. Depositors are paying for those decisions, and the curator's name is the single most useful thing to know about a vault.
6 min read · reviewed
Intermediate
What is a vault in DeFi?
A vault is a smart contract that takes deposits, runs a strategy with them and issues shares that appreciate as the strategy earns. The share accounting is simple; the risk sits in what the strategy does and whether the vault can honor withdrawals when everyone asks at once.
6 min read · reviewed
Intermediate
What is Morpho?
Morpho splits lending into isolated, immutable markets and lets curators recombine them into vaults. The design contains bad debt within a single market, and moves the risk decision from protocol governance to whoever configured the vault you deposited into.
5 min read · reviewed
Advanced
AdvancedAdvanced
Is curation asset management?
Curators pool client money, decide where it goes, take a performance fee and cannot be made to give it back. On every functional test that matters, that is asset management, and the case against rests on how the discretion is exercised rather than on whether discretion exists.
6 min read · reviewed
Advanced
What is a delta neutral strategy?
A delta neutral position holds an asset and shorts the same amount of it, so the price stops mattering and the return comes from funding payments instead. The construction removes price risk and replaces it with funding, counterparty and liquidation risk.
6 min read · reviewed
Advanced
What is a looping strategy?
Looping means depositing collateral, borrowing against it, converting the borrowed asset back into the collateral and repeating. The maximum leverage is one divided by one minus the loan-to-value ratio, and the strategy multiplies a small yield spread and every risk attached to it.
6 min read · reviewed
Stay informed
Verifiable crypto journalism, delivered to your inbox.
Weekday mornings. No hype. No financial advice. Just what happened and why it matters.
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. Read our privacy policy.