DeFi & Smart Contracts

Decentralized finance is what happens when lending, borrowing, swapping and earning are rebuilt as open software instead of institutions. A smart contract is a program that lives on a blockchain and runs exactly as written, which is both the appeal and the hazard: code that executes faithfully will execute a bug just as faithfully, and no support desk can reverse it. This section covers how these systems actually work, what the honest risks are, and how to interact with them carefully. We treat risk as first-class content rather than a footnote, because most retail losses here come from approving something nobody read. Start with our scam-avoidance walkthrough if you are new.