Glossary
DeFi
Decentralized finance: financial primitives (exchanges, lending, derivatives, stablecoins) implemented as open smart contracts instead of via banks or brokers.
DeFi is the term for financial applications built as open smart contracts on a permissionless blockchain. The core primitives — swapping, lending, borrowing, derivatives, stablecoin issuance — all exist on-chain, are composable, and run 24/7 without an intermediary deciding who can use them.
The trade-off is that the protocols are only as safe as their code and oracles: bugs and price-feed manipulation have produced some of the largest single-incident losses in crypto.