About DeFi Explained
Free interactive visualizations, plain-language explainers, and calculators that make decentralized finance actually click. No paywalls, no sign-ups - just deep, honest coverage of how these protocols really work, with interactive tools you can play with instead of just read.
How It Works
Every topic on DeFi Explained follows the same structure: plain-language explainer first, interactive tool second, step-through flow third.
? Try It: AMM Price Impact Simulator
See how trade size affects price on a constant-product AMM. As you increase the trade size, the price impact grows non-linearly.
Data Sources
Every data point on this site traces back to a primary source. Here is where our numbers come from:
Our Mission
DeFi Explained exists because most writing about decentralized finance oversimplifies to the point of being misleading, or assumes you already have years of Solidity experience. We split the difference: start from first principles, then go all the way down to the math, the smart-contract behavior, and the failure modes that matter when real money is on the line.
If you can follow a chart and read a paragraph, you can follow our explainers. And if you want to go deeper - to the byte-level layout of a Uniswap V3 tick or the kink formula in Aave's interest rate model - our interactive tools let you explore those details without needing to read the source code yourself.
How We Build Pages
Why DeFi Education Matters
Traditional finance education is gatekept by universities, certifications, and professional networks. DeFi is permissionless - anyone with an internet connection can interact with protocols that once required a Bloomberg terminal and a prime brokerage account. Education should match that openness.
Every DeFi protocol is a public good with open-source code and on-chain data. That transparency is meaningless if the people who could benefit from it can't read the code or parse the math. Our job is to translate that transparency into accessible knowledge.
DeFi products - leveraged trading, algorithmic stablecoins, restaking - embed complex financial engineering that traditional financial literacy curricula don't cover. As these products grow to hundreds of billions in TVL, the education gap becomes a systemic risk.
Reader questions turn into new explainers and rewrites. Corrections get reviewed within 48 hours and fixed within a week. Feedback is how we get better.
Send us feedback ->What we cover
The site covers every major DeFi primitive: automated market makers (Uniswap, Curve, Balancer), lending and borrowing (Aave, Compound, Morpho, MakerDAO), liquid staking and restaking (Lido, Rocket Pool, EigenLayer, Ether.fi), perpetual futures (Hyperliquid, GMX, dYdX), options (Lyra, Dopex, Thales), bridges and cross-chain messaging (Stargate, Wormhole, LayerZero), oracle mechanisms (Chainlink, Pyth), MEV and orderflow (Flashbots, CowSwap), real-world assets, governance, and the tooling ecosystem that surrounds all of it.
Each topic has its own hub page with links to deep-dive sub-pages covering specific mechanisms. The structure is designed so you can bookmark a hub and return to it as a reference, or follow links into a specific sub-topic when you need a detailed explanation. Every hub page ships with at least one interactive canvas visualization and one calculator or simulator.
Editorial standards
We work from primary sources - deployed smart-contract code, official documentation, published audits, and on-chain data - not from other summaries. AI assists the drafting process but is never trusted for numeric data or mechanism descriptions. Every published page has been reviewed by a human editor before it goes live. The full process is documented in our editorial policy.
Contact and feedback
For corrections, partnership inquiries, or requests for new explainers, use our contact page or email [email protected]. Reader feedback is the most common source of new topics - if you found something confusing, there are probably 500 other people who found it confusing too, and we would rather write the explanation than answer the same question 500 times privately.
Frequently asked questions
- Who writes the content on DeFi Explained?
- Content is produced by the DeFi Explained editorial team - a small group of writers and engineers who read protocol specifications, audits, and on-chain data as a core part of their workflow. We draft with the help of AI writing tools but every published page is reviewed, edited, and fact-checked by a human before it goes live. We use organization-level bylines rather than named personas.
- How often is the site updated?
- Pages covering active protocols (top 50 by traffic) are reviewed on a 90-day rolling cycle. Major updates - governance votes, audit completions, parameter changes - trigger a within-48-hour content update with a visible correction banner. Calculator inputs (APYs, fees, collateral factors) are verified at publish time and checked quarterly. Every page carries a last-updated date so you can verify freshness.
- How does DeFi Explained stay accurate?
- We work from four tiers of primary sources in priority order: (1) deployed smart-contract source code on block explorers, (2) official protocol documentation and governance posts, (3) published audits from recognized firms (OpenZeppelin, Trail of Bits), and (4) on-chain data from Dune, Etherscan, or direct RPC queries. AI assists drafting but is never trusted for numeric data or mechanism descriptions. Every calculator on the site is validated against reference cases before embedding.
- Is DeFi Explained free to use?
- Yes. All content is free with no sign-up required. The site is supported by display advertising (Google AdSense) and affiliate relationships with DeFi protocols - both are disclosed on every page where they are present. Affiliate links never change our editorial conclusions. We will always tell you when a protocol we link to has known risks, and we will recommend a competitor when it is a better fit.