DeFi
Financial services — lending, trading, derivatives — built from smart contracts rather than intermediaries, with users retaining custody of their assets.
Also called decentralised finance · decentralized finance
Financial services — lending, trading, derivatives — built from smart contracts rather than intermediaries, with users retaining custody of their assets.
Why it matters
Removing the intermediary also removes its protections: there is usually no deposit insurance, no reversal and no complaints process.
Related terms
- Smart Contract
- Liquidity Pool
- Yield Farming
Keep reading
Blockchain
A shared record of transactions maintained by many independent computers, where each block of…
Liquidity Pool
A pot of two or more tokens locked in a contract that traders swap…
Staking
Committing tokens to help secure a proof-of-stake network, earning newly issued tokens and fees…
Gas Fee
The payment for the computation a blockchain transaction consumes, paid in the network's own…
NFT
A token representing a unique item rather than an interchangeable unit, recorded on a…
Proof of Work
A consensus method in which participants compete to solve a computational puzzle to add…