Defi Realm

In traditional finance, you entrust your hard-earned money to banks, centralized custodians who can control your every financial move. Want to send, receive, lend, borrow, or invest your money prudently?

First, you must interact with the bank’s interface to access your funds and do so within the rules they and your governing body set. If the withdrawal exceeds a certain threshold, you must also submit a formal request for approval along with any number of other verification documentation.

If you’ve interacted with traditional finance, you know that the process can make it feel like you don’t actually own or control your own money!

What’s worse? As we've seen throughout history, these institutions can sometimes misuse or mismanage your funds. This is because banks don’t have all the money users give them at once, as it is often lent out to other individuals and entities.

In times of emergency or when faced with an onslaught of withdrawals, these banks can collapse like a house of cards, leaving customers to bear the consequences of their mismanagement. DeFi, AKA Decentralized Finance, allows you to be your own bank and take on only the risk that you’ve determined is palatable, hopefully after painstaking research. Through smart contracts and decentralized applications, DeFi empowers you to perform all the same functions as traditional finance but without the need for a centralized authority.

You can lend, borrow, swap, and invest your cryptocurrencies all while maintaining complete control and responsibility over them - for good and bad. This gives you the power and also puts the onus on you to be well-informed and knowledgeable about DeFi.

That’s the main reason PUFF University exists - to help you educate yourself and make sound DeFi decisions. To sum up, DeFi lets you be the sole custodian of your funds and you alone are responsible for what you want to do with them as well as the consequences of your decisions. Now, every Layer 1 and Layer 2 chain has their own DeFi ecosystem, consisting of a wide variety of DeFi dApps. For instance, Uniswap is a popular swapping protocol on $ETH and Jupiter is widely used across the Solana ecosystem as a DEX. The DeFi world is as exhaustive as the Dragon world, but here are some basic concepts: