DeFI 101
What Is Leveraged Yield Farming and How Can It Bring Higher Returns?
In DeFi, while it’s not necessarily true that bigger is always better, the beauty of a high APY never fails to turn heads. And regardless of how much higher DeFi yields are compared to traditional finance, there’s no shortage of…
Crypto Day Trading: Leveraged Yield Farming Strategies
Does leveraged yield farming sound intimidating? It’s understandable that some would feel that way. After all, leverage and yield strategies are tools that professional investors have been known to utilize, their inner workings esoteric to the every-day investor. Yet, with…
DeFi 101: A Visual Guide to Definitions and Data Sources
Insane 1000% returns, tokens named after foods, rugs? We get it, the decentralized finance, or DeFi for short, ecosystem is a whole new world and a complex, and many times anxiety-inducing, one at that. Our very own goofy face of…
Algorithmic Stablecoins Breakdown: Attempting to Fulfill Satoshi's Dream
When Satoshi first published the Bitcoin whitepaper to the world, he titled it “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Cash System” and although Bitcoin would evolve to adopt the digital gold narrative instead, the dream of creating a fully functional digital cash system…
Not All DEXs are Created Equal: Here's the Math
Upshot: Uniswap and PancakeSwap have become household names in decentralized exchanges but a new crop of platforms are coming online with the promise of lower fees and more pricing transparency. With gas prices making headlines throughout the first half of…
Ethereum's Value Extracting Bots: Explainer and Project Map
The ability to write flexible smart contracts in Ethereum and to create composable money lego’s out of it is one of the main reasons why decentralized finance has seen such explosive innovation and growth. But the complexity that is brought…
Solana DeFi Ecosystem Overview
Solana has emerged as one of the handful of smart contracts platforms competing to become a base layer for DeFi applications, with some of its projects gaining traction as its SOL token climbs to the top 15 by market capitalization. …
Governance Tokens: Investing in the Building Blocks of a New Economy
One of the most important building blocks in DeFi is the governance token. When blockchains have on-chain governance, there is no built-in central entity that controls how any given upgrade is managed. Seeing the opportunity, developers all over the world…
What is a DAO? Mapping Out the Ecosystem
This article offers a 10,000ft view on the ‘Decentralized {Autonomous} Organization’, or DAO tooling and project landscape. It’s intended to be complementary to introductory posts like Linda Xie’s ‘A beginner’s guide to DAOs’. The goal is to help contributors and…
Five Leading DeFi Aggregators
As DeFi grows, keeping tabs on all the available products has become increasingly challenging. Even for those individuals who are able to keep track, the scattered nature of the many protocols, each with their own controls and very different user interfaces,…
A Handy Guide to DeFi Taxes
It’s that time of the year again. No, I don’t mean March Madness bracket busting, and I’m not talking about emerging from the depths of winter. That’s right, it’s the yearly time that we all get together and try to…
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 furious. Back up a moment to appreciate DeFi in 2020–the landmark…
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. More specifically, every transaction that occurs on the Ethereum network…
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 DeFi Resources: The Defiant. No surprise here. Subscribe to The Defiant…
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 more than you’re willing to lose. Here’s a rundown of…
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 responsibility. Insurance protects us from the unexpected, and in DeFi,…
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 sell an asset at a pre-determined price on a future…
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 group of assets. In other words, it’s trading a thing…
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 or USDT, come in all sorts of varieties: decentralized vs…
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” to pay higher fees such as $20 per transaction or…
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 trading experience. Trading on DEXs means not having to ask…
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 more to maximize lending yield. Then the idea evolved when…
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 yield farming: It often requires providing liquidity or…
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 we can find the best trading rates across a growing…
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. AMMs are non-custodial, meaning you never give up control of…
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 as “the perpetual swap”–a Bitcoin derivative contract that never expires.…
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 borrowing concept in DeFi, that is somewhat reminiscent of pawnshops.…
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 cryptoassets like ETH, BAT, WBTC, KNC, and more. What Maker…
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 in trade volume daily but also require users to submit personal details like name, email…
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 money–like borrow, lend, trade, and earn interest. In order for users to coordinate such activities…
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 one has to do is click a few buttons and that’s it!Similar to a roundabout,…
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 of this is more control, aka, self-custody. Self-custody refers to individuals being 100% in control…
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 single entity or corporation. CeFi teams can provide valuable services but they’re 100% in charge.…
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 know about and explore early on because 1) they’re easy to understand and 2) battle-tested…
The Defiant's Definitive Guide to DeFi
The Defiant is the leading information company at the intersection of tech and money. It’s the only content platform producing unbiased, objective journalism, that’s focused on decentralized finance. We cover the news in this space day to day, across our newsletter, podcast, YouTube channel, and website.
This guide is meant to be a one-stop-shop to get started. These are all the DeFi basics you will need to start exploring the internet of money.