DeFi

Contents

• Overview
• Lending Protocols
• Dex trading
  • AMMs
  • Serum
  • Derivatives
• Stablecoins
• Bridges
• Oracles
• Indexing
• Insurance
• Governance
• Tools

Overview

• Finematics guide to DeFi
  • a skill tree of DeFi concepts
• Where does yield come from, anyway?
• A theory of DeFi?
  • an overview of DeFi and why it's important develop "theory". Deep-dives into the AMM primitive

Lending protocols

• Lending and borrowing in DeFi (Finematics, Nov 2020)
• Flash loans
  • explaining the flash loan concept pioneered by Aave, as well as how it's used in various arbitrage scenarios
• Optional source material:
  • Aave whitepaper (Dec 2020)
  • Compound whitepaper (Feb 2019)

DEX trading

AMM (swap according to a formula) DEXes

• Constant Function Market-Makers (June 2020)
  • a theoretical assessment of the more general version of constant-product market-makers
• Perp AMMs
  • explaining the vAMM method introduced by Perpetual Protocol and its current pitfalls
• Explaining balancer pools
• UniV3 Simulator

Serum (full order book)

• Serum whitepaper
• A technical introduction to the Serum DEX
  • describes the orderbook interactions and data structures, as well as how they're implemented. Note the section on the request queue is outdated
• Serum core
  • a next-gen orderbook that decouples the matching engine from SPL tokens. Also known as the agnostic orderbook (AOB)
  • DEX v4 is a new version of Serum DEX that builds on top of the AOB

Derivatives

• DeFi Derivative Landscape

Stablecoins

• Stablecoin Overview
  • a general overview of the stablecoin landscape and key differentiators for categorization
• MakerDao Whitepaper
  • the original crypto-collateralized stablecoin
• Terra Whitepaper
• Black Thursday for MakerDao, An Explainer
  • a general overview of MakerDao's Black Thursday event
• Deleverging Spirals and Stablecoins Attacks
  • a deep dive into deleveraging spirals, mempool attacks and an empirical investigation of MakerDao's Black Thursday event
• The Iron Finance Exploit Explained

Bridges

• Bridge survey

Oracles

• The Oracle Report of Delphi (June 2021)
  • overview of the oracle landscape

Indexing

• Intro to The Graph
  • The Graph is a decentralized protocol for indexing and querying blockchain data
    • It's like a search engine framework, and each 'subgraph' is a domain-specific search engine implementation
  • GraphQL API
    • tutorial on how to query a subgraph using GraphQL

Insurance

• Nexus Mutual (NXM) whitepaper

Governance wars and DeFi

• CRV/CVX part 1 (June 2021)
  • describing the innovation of Convex (CVX) as a method for controlling valuable CRV governance votes, as well as the more general question of protocol design with respect to 'meta-protocols' like CVX
• CRV/CVX part 2 (Sep 2021)
  • an in-depth look at the CRV governance war which TokenBrice correctly predicted in part 1
• Mochi scam and the Curve Wars (Nov 2021)

Tools

High-level TVL/usage stats

• Defi Llama - TVL metrics for various DeFi protocols
• Defi pulse - similar, TVL metrics
• DappRadar
• Crypto fees - fees earned by protocol

Portfolio

Use these to track your (or anyone else's) balances/activity across various DeFi protocols.

• Zapper.fi - Eth
• DeBank - Eth
• Sonar.watch - Solana
• Step.finance - Solana
• APY.vision - portfolio tracking / IL analysis / pool analytics

Yield Farming Analytics

• Multifarm.fi - overview of farms on various chains
• LiquidityFolio - farm finder
• DeFi Rate - comparison of lending/borrowing rates across lending protocols

Smart Contract Security

• apesafe.io - contract comparison
• app.unrekt.net - allowance checker
• RugDoc - AMM emergency withdrawal tool, honeypot checker, LP breaker, etc
• defiyield.info - tools for reviewing where you approved ERC20 tokens, timelocks, etc

Airdrops

• twitter.com/defi_airdrops
• etherscan.io/airdrops

Fun

• fees.wtf - check how much you have spent on ETH fees
• il.wtf - check your cumulative IL