Introduction to decentralized finance

DeFi is an open and global financial system built for the internet age – an alternative to a system that's opaque, tightly controlled, and held together by decades-old infrastructure and processes. It gives you control and visibility over your money. It gives you exposure to global markets and alternatives to your local currency or banking options. DeFi products open up financial services to anyone with an internet connection and they're largely owned and maintained by their users. So far tens of billions of dollars worth of crypto has flowed through DeFi applications and it's growing every day.DeFi revolves around decentralized applications, also known as DApps, that perform financial functions on distributed

ledgers called blockchains, a technology that was made popular by Bitcoin and has since been adapted more broadly.

Additionally, Aave introduced "flash loans", which are uncollateralized loans of an arbitrary amount that are taken out and provably paid back within a single blockchain transaction

Another DeFi protocol is Uniswap, which is a decentralized exchange (DEX) set up to trade tokens issued on Ethereum. Rather than using a centralized exchange to fill orders, Uniswap pays users to form liquidity pools in exchange for a percentage of the fees that traders earn by swapping tokens in and out of the liquidity pools.