DeFiBeginner
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
Level
Beginner guides
Guides that assume no prior knowledge of mining. Start here if you are plugging in your first machine or deciding whether to.
DeFiBeginner
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
Mining PoolsBeginner
What are mining pools?
A mining pool combines many miners' hashrate so that rewards arrive as a steady income rather than a rare jackpot. What differs between pools is who absorbs the variance, what that costs, and who decides which transactions go into a block.
5 min read · reviewed
StablecoinsBeginner
What are stablecoins?
A stablecoin is a token designed to hold a fixed value, almost always one US dollar. What separates the designs is what stands behind the peg, and what happens to redemption when the market stops believing it.
6 min read · reviewed
StablecoinsBeginner
What are the most popular stablecoins?
Two tokens account for about 85 percent of stablecoin supply, and the rest of the market is a long tail of bank-issued, protocol-issued and yield-bearing alternatives. The figures below were observed on 8 September 2026 and move constantly.
5 min read · reviewed
Mining PoolsBeginner
What Is a Mining Pool and How Do Payouts Work?
A mining pool pools hashrate so that block rewards arrive as small, regular payments instead of a rare jackpot. The scheme a pool uses to split those rewards, PPS, FPPS or PPLNS, decides who carries the risk of a slow week and how much the pool keeps.
8 min read · reviewed
DeFiBeginner
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
Mining BasicsBeginner
What is cryptocurrency mining?
Mining is the process of competing to add the next block to a blockchain by finding a hash below a target, in exchange for newly issued coins and transaction fees. The competition is deliberately expensive, and that expense is what makes the ledger difficult to rewrite.
5 min read · reviewed
DeFiBeginner
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
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