Table of contents
DeFi is best learned about through ongoing dialogue with your peers in practical places. In order to encourage a participatory approach which is as dynamic as DeFi can be at its best, we keep our content in the ever-growing and changing Kernel Library, to which we encourage you to contribute.
To give you a brief taste of what is there, we end up defining DeFi (after discussing what decentralization is and what finance means), as:
A set of systems for communicating reliably what and whom we have faith in, and who is able to settle, pardon, or otherwise forgive our debt. There is no single controller of these systems; they are resilient; and they are replicated in terms of both access and functionality.
Given that our access to meaning, and the ability to make money representative of our values, has traditionally been regulated by other people who may not have our best interests at heart, this is an interesting topic to study. It does not mean it is necessarily good: that comes down to what you choose to put your faith in and how you choose to express that faith. In other words, what code will you adopt?
If you don't like definitions and would like to get on with adopting code, we reckon this is a good place to start:
Wacth & Learn¶
DeFi 101 - The Economics of Token Engineering
DeFi 102.1 - Standards for DeFi protocols
DeFi 102.2 - DeFi inspirations from other economic systems
DeFi 102.3 - Auctions: a forward looking history
DeFi 102.4 - Price discovery innovations
DeFi 201.1 - Market Structure & Design
Liquidity Incentives with Curtis Spencer
Risk, Insurance & Audits with Jack Sanford
NFTs, Fixed Interest Rate & ADM, but also how to find good people
MEV¶
There are so many concepts to understand in DeFi that it is difficult to pick out where to start. For those of you serious about building stuff, we feel that understanding more about Miner Extractable Value is a great place to begin because it genuinely is new and different to any other financial environment we have ever created, and so understanding this will help you understand most everything else you need to in order to build constructive and beneficial services in this brave new world.