All lessons
The published lessons in reading order.
Level 1 · DeFi Foundation · Financial System Fundamentals · 8 min
What functions a financial system performs
Five functions every financial system must perform — and the question of who performs each of them in DeFi.
Level 1 · DeFi Foundation · Financial System Fundamentals · 9 min
Counterparties and settlement
Who bears the risk between trade and performance — and what takes the clearing house's place when there is none.
Level 1 · DeFi Foundation · Financial System Fundamentals · 12 min
Where a price comes from
Money market, capital market, primary and secondary market — and why a quoted price is a statement about the last trade, not about yours.
Level 1 · DeFi Foundation · Blockchain Fundamentals · 8 min
The distributed ledger
How a blockchain makes transactions binding — and what kind of binding that actually is.
Level 1 · DeFi Foundation · Blockchain Fundamentals · 8 min
Keys, wallets and custody
What a key actually controls — and why “wallet” is a misleading word.
Level 1 · DeFi Foundation · Blockchain Fundamentals · 9 min
Gas, layer 2 and bridges
What a transaction costs, why layer 2 is cheaper — and which assumptions come with it.
Level 1 · DeFi Foundation · Blockchain Fundamentals · 12 min
Who determines the order
Consensus is agreement on what happened in which order — and whoever fixes that order holds more power than it first appears.
Level 1 · DeFi Foundation · Smart Contracts · 9 min
What a smart contract is — and is not
A program with state and permissions. Neither a contract in the legal sense nor an entity that knows what happens off the chain.
Level 1 · DeFi Foundation · Smart Contracts · 8 min
Admin rights, upgrades and timelocks
Who can change the rules of a live position, how fast — and how much warning remains.
Level 1 · DeFi Foundation · Smart Contracts · 12 min
What a contract cannot enforce
Three limits no code removes: data from outside, claims against people, and anything someone does off the chain.
Level 1 · DeFi Foundation · DeFi Fundamentals · 7 min
Telling CeFi and DeFi apart
Not by the name, but by three checkable questions: who holds custody, who can freeze, who changes the rules?
Level 1 · DeFi Foundation · DeFi Fundamentals · 9 min
Composability: the property that cuts both ways
Why protocols can build on each other — and why that is DeFi's most important source of risk.
Level 1 · DeFi Foundation · DeFi Fundamentals · 12 min
The stack and the incentives
The four layers DeFi runs on — and the question of who actually pays for any one of them to keep running.
Level 1 · DeFi Foundation · DeFi Market Structure · 9 min
The market segments and what they are paid for
DEX, lending, stablecoin, staking — four mechanics, four yield sources, four different risks.
Level 1 · DeFi Foundation · DeFi Market Structure · 9 min
Stablecoins: who holds the backing?
Four questions that classify a stablecoin — and why “USD 1.00” on screen answers none of them.
Level 1 · DeFi Foundation · DeFi Market Structure · 13 min
Staking, liquid staking, restaking
Three steps, each placing a claim on top of a claim — and each adding one more condition.
Level 2 · DeFi Analyst · DeFi Data Literacy · 10 min
Reading TVL — and what TVL does not measure
DeFi's most quoted metric, decomposed into its two moving parts.
Level 2 · DeFi Analyst · DeFi Data Literacy · 10 min
Decomposing APY: base, reward, assumption
One percentage, three statements — and an assumption that rarely comes with it.
Level 2 · DeFi Analyst · DeFi Data Literacy · 14 min
Reading user counts and utilization
An active address is not a person, and high utilization is not success — two metrics routinely read as their opposite.
Level 2 · DeFi Analyst · Protocol Analysis · 12 min
Examining a protocol in the same order every time
Why a fixed examination order beats a good hunch — and where it makes your own ignorance visible.
Level 2 · DeFi Analyst · Protocol Analysis · 11 min
Reading a risk assessment — and this platform's flag points
What this platform's flag points actually compute, which seven factors they know, why they no longer assign a bucket, and which risks they explicitly do not see.
Level 2 · DeFi Analyst · Protocol Analysis · 15 min
Examining revenue and the business model
Who pays, for what, and where does it stay — three questions separating fees from revenue and both from the token.
Level 2 · DeFi Analyst · Tokenomics · 11 min
Tokenomics: supply, distribution, value capture
Three questions about any token — and why the third most often goes unanswered.
Level 2 · DeFi Analyst · Tokenomics · 10 min
Reading the emission schedule
The one part of tokenomics that carries dates — and what can be computed ahead of a cliff.
Level 2 · DeFi Analyst · Liquidity Analysis · 11 min
Liquidity is not TVL
The difference between deposited capital and what can actually be moved.
Level 2 · DeFi Analyst · Liquidity Analysis · 11 min
Computing slippage instead of guessing it
Price impact, slippage tolerance and market depth are routinely confused — they measure three different things.
Level 2 · DeFi Analyst · Liquidity Analysis · 15 min
Who provides the liquidity — and for how long
Liquidity has owners. How few they are and what holds them decides whether it is still there under stress.
Level 2 · DeFi Analyst · On-Chain Analysis · 12 min
On-chain analysis: what addresses evidence
The chain shows completely what happened — never who did it, or why.
Level 2 · DeFi Analyst · On-Chain Analysis · 11 min
Reading flows: exchanges, treasury, bridges
What a movement evidences — and why a transfer to an exchange address is not a sale.
Level 2 · DeFi Analyst · On-Chain Analysis · 15 min
Reading holder distribution
How many addresses hold a token says almost nothing. How much the largest hold, and what kind of addresses they are, says almost everything.
Level 2 · DeFi Analyst · DEX Analysis · 13 min
DEX mechanics: what a liquidity provider lives on
The formula that forms the price — and the calculation that decides whether providing was worth it.
Level 2 · DeFi Analyst · DEX Analysis · 11 min
MEV and execution quality
A cost that appears in no quoted return — and that an organization pays regardless.
Level 2 · DeFi Analyst · Lending Analysis · 12 min
Lending markets: utilization, LTV, liquidation
How a collateralized lending market computes — and at which three points it breaks.
Level 2 · DeFi Analyst · Lending Analysis · 11 min
The rate model and market parameters
The curve that turns utilization into a rate — and the point where the protocol chooses between yield and availability.
Level 3 · DeFi Risk & Research Specialist · Smart Contract Risk · 12 min
Smart contract risk: the failure classes
Where contracts actually fail — and why “audited” is a statement about a point in time, not a property.
Level 3 · DeFi Risk & Research Specialist · Smart Contract Risk · 11 min
Actually checking upgrade and proxy rights
Four questions answerable from chain state — and what to do when one of them stays open.
Level 3 · DeFi Risk & Research Specialist · Smart Contract Risk · 16 min
When nothing breaks
The class of incidents in which every contract did exactly what it says — and the outcome is a loss anyway.
Level 3 · DeFi Risk & Research Specialist · Economic Risk · 13 min
Economic risk: when the mechanism amplifies itself
Leverage, reflexivity and incentive dependency — three designs where nothing breaks and everything still tips over.
Level 3 · DeFi Risk & Research Specialist · Economic Risk · 12 min
Measuring leverage, including the hidden kind
How repeated depositing and borrowing turns into a multiple of the starting position — and how to spot it in a book.
Level 3 · DeFi Risk & Research Specialist · Economic Risk · 16 min
Maturity transformation and liquidity spirals
Taken in short, lent out long — the oldest business in finance, in a form with no central bank behind it.
Level 3 · DeFi Risk & Research Specialist · Market Risk · 12 min
Market risk: volatility, correlation, tail
The classic measures — and the three places where they systematically miss in DeFi.
Level 3 · DeFi Risk & Research Specialist · Market Risk · 12 min
Building scenarios instead of quoting metrics
Four components without which a stress scenario carries no decision — and why the reverse question is the most useful one.
Level 3 · DeFi Risk & Research Specialist · Market Risk · 15 min
Basis risk: when the hedge misses
Two things that nearly always move together come apart exactly when it matters — and nobody carries the difference but you.
Level 3 · DeFi Risk & Research Specialist · Stablecoin Analysis · 13 min
Stress-testing a stablecoin
Eleven fields that describe a stablecoin — and the three that alone matter under stress.
Level 3 · DeFi Risk & Research Specialist · Stablecoin Analysis · 11 min
Checking reserve and attestation
What an attestation says about a reserve — and the three questions it routinely leaves open.
Level 3 · DeFi Risk & Research Specialist · Oracle Risk · 11 min
Oracle risk: where the price comes from
The data source a collateralized position is actually exposed to.
Level 3 · DeFi Risk & Research Specialist · Oracle Risk · 11 min
Documenting the oracle architecture
Five details an oracle review has to record — and the one that decides when it matters.
Level 3 · DeFi Risk & Research Specialist · Oracle Risk · 16 min
What it would cost to move the price
Manipulation risk is not a guess about intentions but a calculation: the cost of the move set against what depends on it.
Level 3 · DeFi Risk & Research Specialist · Governance Risk · 12 min
Governance risk: who can change the rules
Formal decentralization and actual decision-making power routinely come apart — and only the second affects a position.
Level 3 · DeFi Risk & Research Specialist · Governance Risk · 11 min
Reading and assessing governance proposals
A monitoring process that needs no opinion on the proposal — and still triggers in time.
Level 3 · DeFi Risk & Research Specialist · Composability & Systemic Risk · 13 min
Systemic risk along a chain
How a single failure hits several apparently independent positions at once.
Level 3 · DeFi Risk & Research Specialist · Composability & Systemic Risk · 12 min
Building a dependency map
A four-step procedure whose most important output is the list of what could not be established.
Level 4 · Institutional DeFi Analyst · Institutional DeFi · 12 min
What an institution has to settle first
Custody, execution, settlement, counterparty — the four questions that come before any question about returns.
Level 4 · Institutional DeFi Analyst · Institutional DeFi · 13 min
Legal structure and operating risk
Which layer has an addressee and which does not — and why a 3-of-5 multisig says nothing yet about key management.
Level 4 · Institutional DeFi Analyst · Banking Analysis · 12 min
The same data, read as a bank
How a DeFi finding translates into a bank's own risk categories — and where the translation has no equivalent.
Level 4 · Institutional DeFi Analyst · Banking Analysis · 13 min
Counterparty and compliance risk from a bank's perspective
Where a position is booked when there is no counterparty — and why compliance risk arises at the edges, not in the middle.
Level 4 · Institutional DeFi Analyst · Insurance Analysis · 12 min
The insurance view: defining the event
The hard part is not the pricing but the question of what counts as a loss event at all — and how many policies it hits at once.
Level 4 · Institutional DeFi Analyst · Insurance Analysis · 14 min
Aggregation and risk transfer
Why spreading across protocols is not spreading across dependencies — and what a risk transfer is worth when it shares the same trigger.
Level 4 · Institutional DeFi Analyst · Asset Management · 13 min
Asset management: position size before return
What an investment committee actually needs — and why the binding constraint is almost never the expected return.
Level 4 · Institutional DeFi Analyst · Asset Management · 14 min
Position sizing and the investment committee
Size is the only lever entirely in the institution's hands — and a committee paper is decidable only once what is unknown is written in it.
Level 4 · Institutional DeFi Analyst · Asset Management · 15 min
What a position is valued at
The last traded rate, the size-adjusted one, or the computed value of a claim — three numbers that could make a valuation, and only one fits the question.
Level 4 · Institutional DeFi Analyst · Regulatory Analysis · 13 min
The regulatory examination chain
Not “is DeFi regulated”, but: which activity, which entity, which jurisdiction, which framework — and what stays open.
Level 4 · Institutional DeFi Analyst · Regulatory Analysis · 14 min
Examining a token's classification
Classification follows function, not name — and where the perimeter is open, the open part belongs in the result.