✧ intheloop ✧Traditional finance is a stack of intermediaries: banks hold balances, brokers route orders, clearinghouses settle them. Decentralized finance replaces that stack with public code on a shared ledger. The bank becomes a smart contract; the ledger becomes something anyone can read and no single party can rewrite.
Three properties that matter
- Permissionless: anyone with a wallet can use a protocol; there is no account manager to say no.
- Transparent: balances, rules, and flows are on-chain and auditable by anyone, in real time.
- Composable: protocols call each other like functions, so financial products stack like software libraries.
DeFi is not a better bank. It is the removal of the bank, with everything that removal implies, good and bad.
Composability is the quiet superpower. A lending market, an exchange, and a stablecoin are independent contracts, yet one transaction can borrow, swap, and repay across all three atomically: either everything succeeds or nothing does.
The rest of this course walks the stack one layer at a time, starting where every user starts, whether they realize it or not: the key that is the account.