DeFi News

In decentralised finance the security model is the product. A lending market or an exchange built from smart contracts can do genuinely useful things without a company in the middle — and when the code has a flaw, the loss is total and there is nobody to appeal to.

So this section covers exploits properly. When a protocol is drained we report what the code actually did, how much left, and whether the flaw was in the contract, in the price oracle it trusted, or in the economic design. We do not repeat a project's framing that an exploit was "an attack by a sophisticated actor" when the contract simply permitted it.

We also cover the ordinary mechanics: lending and borrowing against collateral, decentralised exchanges and how they price, liquidation mechanisms, and total value locked as an indicator with real limits — the same dollar can be counted several times across protocols that build on each other.

Yield deserves scepticism by default. A high advertised return in DeFi is a description of risk, and it is frequently paid in a protocol's own freshly issued token rather than in anything you would want to hold. Where a yield's source is not identifiable, that is the story.

There is no deposit insurance here, no fraud reversal and no counterparty to sue. Our glossary defines the vocabulary, and risk management covers sizing. Nothing in this section is financial advice.

One structural risk that deserves naming: composability. Protocols build on each other, so a failure in one can propagate through everything that depended on its prices or its collateral. That is what turns a single contract bug into a cascade across several unrelated-looking platforms, and it is why "total value locked" can fall much faster than any individual protocol's problem would suggest.