What is DeFi?

DeFi replaces the middleman with code. Where a bank would run a loan desk, a lending protocol holds deposits in a smart contract and sets rates with a formula. Where a broker would route your order, an automated market maker lets anyone swap tokens against a pool. You need a wallet and that is it. Nobody approves you, and nothing closes at 5pm.

The pieces stack. A token earned in one protocol becomes collateral in a second, gets borrowed against, and ends up in a pool on a third. Builders call this composability. It is why DeFi ships new products so quickly, and also why one broken protocol can drag others down with it.

The risks are not the ones a bank has. Contract bugs, oracle manipulation, bridge exploits and governance attacks have each caused nine-figure losses. And a yield that looks too good usually hides something, like a reward token that bleeds value or a leverage loop that unwinds hard in a sell-off.

Made-up numbers: you stake 100 SOL through a liquid staking protocol, get an LST back, post it as collateral on a lending market and borrow $5,000 of USDC against it. You pick up a little yield at each step, and each step adds a contract that has to keep working. If the LST depegs, the loan can be liquidated even though SOL never moved.

Also called: decentralized finance.

Solana yields shows Sanctum LST APYs, Marinade's 30-day mSOL APY and Kamino main-market lending rates. Raydium pools ranks pools by volume, TVL or APR, and Market flows follows DefiLlama stablecoin supply. All of it is read-only. Cashboard's own code never signs and never moves a token. If you swap on the web, your own wallet signs in Jupiter's or LI.FI's form.

• Solana yields
• Raydium pools
• Market flows

• Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org

• Automated market maker
• Lending market
• Total value locked
• Liquid staking token
• Yield farming