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From your first block to the finer details. Explore the ideas, people, and systems behind the market—one useful explanation at a time.
Follow a transaction from a key to a shared ledger.
Begin with BlockchainExplore contracts, liquidity, borrowing and the risks between them.
Begin with Smart contractUnderstand what a price, valuation or sentiment indicator can tell you.
Begin with Market capitalizationLearn custody, permissions and how to assess what you sign.
Begin with Hardware walletConnect the original ideas to the incidents that changed the industry.
Begin with A Cypherpunk's ManifestoSeparate technical standards, issuer claims and legal frameworks.
Begin with Howey testMoving a spot or TWAP feed so a protocol misprices collateral or a liquidations fire wrongly.
A concentrated LP whose range no longer covers the price, so it earns no fees and sits in one asset.
A loan that requires collateral worth more than the debt, the usual DeFi design because on-chain credit scores are weak.
Off-chain scores that hint at a future airdrop. They are not tokens and can be changed or cancelled.
How much notional an AMM can trade before price moves a given percent.
A feed that tells contracts the reference price of an asset. Bad oracles cause bad liquidations.
When the protocol owns the LP position and keeps fees, reducing mercenary TVL churn.
Liquidity the protocol itself owns, so it keeps the trading fees instead of renting depth from mercenary LPs.
A Maker-style module that swaps a trusted stablecoin 1:1 for Dai/USDS to defend the peg.
Return paid from protocol fees or revenue rather than from inflationary token emissions.
Idle cash or ETH a protocol keeps so small exits do not wait for the chain withdrawal queue.
Reusing already-staked ETH or a receipt token to secure extra services, adding slashing risk for extra yield.
An airdrop that rewards past usage, announced after the qualifying activity already happened.
A DEX mode where professional market makers quote a size directly, often better for large tickets.
The contract that finds a path through pools and executes a swap in one call.
Breaking a trade across pools and hops to reduce impact.
A form of MEV that buys just before a victim swap and sells just after, extracting their slippage.
A design (Balancer v2, Uniswap v4) where many pools share one vault contract to save gas and settle net.
The worst price you accept before a swap reverts. Too tight fails. Too loose invites sandwiches.
Apps that turn social graphs, posts, or attention into tradable tokens or keys.
The interest a Maker-style vault pays to keep debt open, the other side of the savings rate.
Locking tokens to help secure a proof-of-stake network or a protocol and earning rewards for that lock.
A protocol rainy-day fund built from fees, used before socializing losses.
A discrete price step in a concentrated-liquidity pool.
The granularity of concentrated-liquidity prices. Wider spacing means coarser ranges.
A delay between a governance decision and its on-chain execution, giving users time to exit.
The total USD value of assets deposited in a DeFi protocol or chain.
Tokens and stables held by a protocol or DAO to fund development, incentives, or runway.
A time-weighted on-chain price that is harder to shove with one block, still gameable over longer windows.
A loan larger than the posted collateral, which needs identity, legal claims, or off-chain underwriting.
Designs that share inventory across markets or chains so traders see one deeper book.
A v4 plugin that runs custom logic around a swap or LP action (oracles, dynamic fees, KYC).
The share of a lending pool that is borrowed. Rate models raise interest as utilization climbs.
Definitions offer a starting point. Detailed readings include linked evidence. Approved reference readings refresh in a daily rotation; original explainers show their editorial review date. Find new research papers →