DeFi & Protocols
Also: DeFi, open finance
Decentralized Finance DeFi
Financial services — lending, trading, yield — delivered through open smart contracts rather than centralized intermediaries.
DeFi is an umbrella term for financial applications built on public blockchains that replicate and extend traditional finance without centralized intermediaries. Key primitives include decentralized exchanges, lending protocols, stablecoins, and yield aggregators. DeFi protocols are permissionless — anyone with a wallet can access them — and composable, meaning protocols can be layered together like financial Lego blocks. Total value locked (TVL) is the standard metric for DeFi ecosystem size.