DeFi 101: Decentralized Finance

Photo by Mariia Shalabaieva on Unsplash

Welcome back to the 60-Day Web3 Journey.

If you’ve been following along, you know what we’ve covered so far. Day 1, I introduced why I’m learning Web3 in public — to transition into Developer Relations and help non-technical people understand blockchain. Days 2–4, we broke down the fundamentals: what blockchain is, why Bitcoin was revolutionary, and how it challenged traditional money. Days 5–7, we went deeper into Ethereum — the programmable blockchain — and learned about wallets, gas fees, and why Layer 2 solutions exist to solve Ethereum’s scaling problems. Day 8, we understood smart contracts and dApps (decentralized applications) — the actual code that powers everything. And Day 9? We got our hands dirty. We deployed our first real smart contract on Sepolia testnet, felt the transaction cost, and saw how code lives permanently on a blockchain.

Now comes the moment where it all clicks.

You just deployed a smart contract on Ethereum and saw how code can live on a blockchain. Now comes the real question: what are people actually doing with these contracts?

The answer: they’re building an entirely new financial system. It’s called DeFi — Decentralized Finance — and it’s where smart contracts stop being abstract and become the backbone of how people trade, lend, borrow, and earn money without banks.

This is Day 10 of your 60-day Web3 journey. Let’s see what you’re about to enter.

What Is DeFi, Really?

DeFi is finance without a middleman. Instead of a bank holding your money, a smart contract does. Instead of a broker matching your trade, an algorithm does. Instead of a lender deciding if you qualify, code does.

Here’s the core idea: take every financial service you know — trading, lending, borrowing, investing — and rebuild it as code that anyone can use, anytime, from anywhere.

That’s DeFi.

The key difference from traditional finance:

Traditional FinanceDeFiA bank holds your moneyA smart contract holds itBank decides lending termsAlgorithms and math decideYou need approval to borrowYou need collateral (held by code)Trades happen during market hoursTrades happen 24/7/365You trust the bank won’t failYou verify the code is secure

How DeFi Actually Works

Let me walk you through the three biggest types of DeFi protocols right now:

1. Decentralized Exchanges (DEXes) — Swap Tokens Instantly

A DEX is like a vending machine for crypto. You put in one token, you get another token out. No human operator. No waiting. No fees to a company.

The most famous is Uniswap. As of December 2025, Uniswap has over $5.7 billion locked in it — that means people have deposited $5.7B in tokens across thousands of trading pairs. Here’s how it works:

1. Someone (a “liquidity provider”) deposits two tokens into a smart contract — say, $1 million in ETH and $1 million in USDC.
2. The contract now has a “pool” of both.
3. You come along and want to swap 10 ETH for USDC.
4. You send your 10 ETH to the contract.
5. The contract automatically calculates the price and sends you USDC back.
6. The liquidity provider earns a tiny percentage of every swap — their reward for putting in capital.

No middleman. No trading desk. No commission. Just code.

Uniswap v4 (their newest version, launched mid-2025) hit $1 billion in TVL in just 177 days and has processed over $1 trillion in annual trading volume. That’s real money moving through smart contracts.

2. Lending Protocols — Earn Interest, Take Loans

What if you could deposit your crypto and earn interest — without a bank? That’s Aave.

Aave is the biggest lending protocol in DeFi. As of mid-2025, it has over $60 billion in deposits and $29 billion in outstanding loans. It controls roughly 60% of the entire DeFi lending market.

Here’s the flow:

1. You deposit 100 USDC into Aave.
2. Aave lends it out to someone who needs to borrow.
3. That borrower pays interest (let’s say 5% APY).
4. You earn that interest minus a small cut for the protocol.
5. You can withdraw your money + interest anytime.

If you want to borrow, you do the reverse:

1. You deposit collateral (say, 1 ETH worth $2,500).
2. Aave lets you borrow up to 70% of that ($1,750 in USDC).
3. You pay interest on your loan.
4. When you repay + interest, you get your collateral back.

No credit check. No bank manager. No waiting for approval. Just math: if you have collateral, you can borrow.

In August 2025 alone, Aave saw its TVL grow by 55%. In Q2 2025, the protocol generated $122 million in fees. Real money. Real usage.

3. Yield Farming — Stake Tokens, Earn Rewards

This is the newcomer to the DeFi toolkit, and it’s wild.

Yield farming is when you lock up tokens in a protocol and earn rewards in return. Sometimes the rewards come from protocol fees. Sometimes they come from newly minted tokens the protocol gives you as an incentive to provide liquidity.

Example: You deposit ETH and USDC into Uniswap’s liquidity pool (the vending machine from section 1). For providing that liquidity, you earn a share of trading fees plus UNI tokens as a bonus. That’s yield farming.

It sounds simple, but it’s powerful: DeFi protocols can incentivize behavior they want (liquidity provision, borrowing) by paying users with newly minted tokens.

Why Does This Matter? (2025 Context)

DeFi isn’t theoretical anymore. Here’s what’s actually happening:

Scale:

• Over 14.2 million wallets have used DeFi protocols by mid-2025 (Source: CoinLaw DeFi Statistics 2025).
• DeFi TVL across all protocols is $123.6 billion, a 41% increase year-over-year (Source: NASSCOM Blockchain Community).
• Weekly transaction volume exceeds $48 billion (Source: TradeSanta DeFi Trends 2025).
• The average DeFi user conducts 11.6 transactions monthly — it’s becoming routine (Source: CoinLaw DeFi Statistics 2025).

Adoption:

• Gen Z (ages 18–25) now makes up 38% of first-time DeFi wallet users in 2025 (Source: Brave New Coin — Gen Z and DeFi).
• Mobile DeFi wallet usage grew by 45%, now accounting for 58% of all users (Source: CoinLaw DeFi Statistics 2025).
• DeFi search interest on Google Trends hit 92 out of 100 — its highest in 18 months (Source: CoinLaw DeFi Statistics 2025).
• Active DeFi users reached 20 million unique wallets globally — a 2,000% increase since 2021 (Source: CoinLaw Crypto Demographics 2025).

Institutional Money:

• Real-world assets (RWA) lending surged to $1.9 billion for commodity-backed tokens (Source: CoinGecko RWA 2025 Report).
• Tokenized private credit now exceeds $12 billion in TVL (March 2025), representing over 50% of the RWA market (Source: Antier Solutions — Top Performing Tokenized Assets 2025).
• Aave founder Stani Kulechov launched Horizon (RWA-backed lending platform) which surpassed $500 million in deposits as the fastest-growing platform for institutional RWA-backed loans (Source: Chainlink Today — Stani Kulechov).

This isn’t a niche anymore. This is infrastructure.

Deep Dive: Watch This

If you want a structured breakdown of everything DeFi, YouTuber faixal_abbaci released a comprehensive 32-minute DeFi Masterclass (December 2025) that covers:

• What DeFi is and why it matters
• How DEXes, lending protocols, and liquidity pools actually work
• Staking, yield farming, and real-world asset tokenization
• DeFi security risks and best practices
• Advanced strategies and the future of finance

The Connection to Your Deployed Contract

Remember your SimpleStorage contract from Day 9? It stored a number permanently on the blockchain.

That’s the mechanism behind DeFi. Aave, Uniswap, all of it — they’re just more sophisticated smart contracts doing exactly what yours did: storing data and executing rules when triggered.

The difference:

• Your contract stored one number.
• Aave stores thousands of lending positions, interest rates, and collateral amounts.
• Uniswap stores thousands of token pairs and liquidity pools.

But the principle is identical: code running on a blockchain, with no middleman, doing the job that bankers used to do.

What’s the Catch?

DeFi is powerful, but it’s not without risk:

1. Smart contract bugs — If the code has a flaw, money can get stuck or stolen. Aave has been audited hundreds of times, but risks remain.
2. No insurance — If Aave crashes tomorrow, your deposits are gone. Banks have FDIC insurance. DeFi doesn’t.
3. You need to understand what you’re doing — There’s no customer service to call if you send your tokens to the wrong address.
4. Gas fees — Every transaction costs money to execute on Ethereum.
5. Price risk — If you borrow against ETH and the price crashes, you might get liquidated (forced to pay back your loan).

These are real risks. But as of 2025, millions of people believe the upside (financial access, high returns, no middleman) outweighs the downside.

Hands-On: Try It Yourself

Want to see DeFi in action? Here’s the simplest starting point without spending money:

1. Go to Uniswap (https://uniswap.org) — don’t trade, just explore.
2. Look at the pools, the trading volume, the pairs being swapped every second.
3. Connect your MetaMask wallet (read-only is fine).
4. Pick a token pair — say ETH → USDC — and see the swap price.
5. Click on the “Pool” section and see where liquidity providers have deposited capital.

Notice that there’s no login page, no terms and conditions, no “sign up” button. It’s just code. Open to everyone. Available 24/7.

That’s the revolution.

What Happens Next?

You now understand:

• How smart contracts power a new financial system.
• Why DeFi is growing faster than traditional finance in adoption.
• How the biggest protocols (Uniswap, Aave) actually work.

Tomorrow (Day 11), we’ll talk about NFTs — which, like DeFi, are powered by smart contracts but solve a completely different problem.

But before you go, here’s a thought: if DeFi lets you trade, lend, and borrow without permission, then what’s stopping someone from doing the same thing with digital art, game items, or concert tickets?

That’s NFTs. That’s Day 11.

Key Takeaways

• DeFi = Finance without a middleman, powered by smart contracts.
• Three main types: DEXes (Uniswap for trading), Lending (Aave for earn/borrow), Yield Farming (staking for rewards).
• Real scale: $123.6 billion TVL, 14.2 million users, $48 billion weekly volume as of mid-2025.
• Real adoption: Gen Z makes up 38% of new DeFi users; mobile usage is 58% of total.
• Institutional growth: RWA sector at $12 billion TVL, Aave Horizon crossed $500M in deposits.
• Connection to your work: Everything you deployed in Day 9 is the foundation for DeFi protocols.

DeFi 101: Decentralized Finance was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.