DeFi
Decentralized finance — lending, trading and earning yield through code-run protocols instead of banks or brokers.
DeFi (decentralized finance) is an umbrella term for financial services — trading, lending, borrowing, earning interest — delivered by smart contracts on a blockchain instead of by banks and brokers. Anyone with a wallet can use them; there is no account approval and no business hours.
The trade-off is that the safety nets are gone too: no deposit insurance, no fraud department, no password reset. Bugs in a protocol’s code, manipulated price feeds and outright scams have cost users billions. “Total value locked” (TVL) — the sum of assets deposited in a protocol — is the most common measure of DeFi adoption.