DeFi.

Decentralized Finance: financial protocols built from smart contracts on public blockchains that offer lending, trading, and other services without traditional intermediaries. It belongs to the Web3 & Blockchain category of cybersecurity.

Decentralized Finance: financial protocols built from smart contracts on public blockchains that offer lending, trading, and other services without traditional intermediaries.

DeFi is the ecosystem of permissionless financial applications that run on public blockchains such as Ethereum, Layer 2 networks, and other smart-contract platforms. Representative protocols include Uniswap (automated market-maker DEX), Aave and Compound (lending and borrowing), Curve (stablecoin swaps), and MakerDAO (DAI stablecoin). DeFi removes the need for a bank or broker, but introduces unique risks: smart-contract bugs (re-entrancy, logic flaws, oracle manipulation), economic exploits (flash loans, MEV, governance attacks), bridge compromises, and operational pitfalls (lost private keys, malicious frontends). Defensive practices include code audits, formal verification, bug bounties, multisig governance, circuit breakers, and on-chain monitoring tools.

Defences for DeFi typically combine technical controls and operational practices, as detailed in the full definition above.

Common alternative names include: Decentralized Finance, Open finance.