Introduction

This course begins before tactics, before yield, before any decision that carries consequence.

It begins with orientation.

Decentralized Finance - DeFi - is often presented as a landscape of applications, dashboards, and opportunities. But those surfaces are not the system itself. They are interfaces layered on top of something more fundamental: a set of mechanisms that coordinate financial activity without discretion.

At its core, DeFi is a financial system that runs without permission.

There are no account managers behind the scenes, no committees adjusting outcomes, no exceptions granted because circumstances feel unusual. Rules are expressed in code, deployed to networks, and executed automatically. Once live, they apply equally to everyone who interacts with them - regardless of experience, intention, or timing.

This precision is what gives DeFi its power.
It is also what gives it its sharp edges.

Where traditional finance relies on institutions to interpret rules, DeFi relies on constraints to enforce them. Outcomes are not negotiated; they are produced. When value moves, it does so because a rule was triggered. When something behaves unexpectedly, it is still behaving correctly - according to the design that governs it.

Seeing this distinction clearly matters more than any interface or feature.

Because when you interact with DeFi, you are not using a service. You are entering a mechanism.

Mechanisms do not adapt to you.
They respond to inputs.

They do not understand context.
They execute structure.

And they do not distinguish between error and intention - only between valid and invalid actions.

This course is designed to make that structure visible.

You will move through DeFi as a system, not as a collection of products. You will see how coordination works when intermediaries are removed, how markets function without waiting for counterparties, how participants occupy roles rather than identities, and how value flows through the system as a result of incentives rather than promises.

As this picture comes into focus, three questions should become answerable without hesitation:

What rule governs the mechanism I am entering?
Who is compensated when this system operates - and for what reason?
Where does risk relocate when conditions change?

These questions are not advanced. They are foundational. And without clear answers, everything that follows - yield, liquidity, staking - appears confusing or unfair when it isn’t.

DeFi is not chaotic by nature.
It is exact.

It does not hide information deliberately.
It becomes opaque when viewed through abstraction instead of architecture.

In the next chapter, we begin at the point where this shift becomes visible: the moment finance stopped asking for permission, and started enforcing rules instead.

That is where the architecture reveals itself.

Takeaway: DeFi is not a service you use - it is a mechanism you enter.