DeFi Safety Course

About this course

DeFi is the most operationally complex layer of crypto and the one where the largest single losses keep happening. Eight lessons of about 22 minutes each move you from 'I broadly understand AMMs and lending' to 'I can read an audit, identify the oracle, evaluate the bridge, recognize the exploit class, and run a pre-deposit checklist that catches the patterns that have caused billions in losses.' Every claim is sourced to the protocol specs, the post-mortems, or the on-chain transactions themselves. No yield strategy recommendations, no buy/sell signals, no financial advice — just the structural understanding that lets you evaluate any DeFi protocol against the patterns we have already seen fail.

What you'll be able to do

• Explain how an AMM actually prices a swap, where slippage comes from, and how Uniswap V2 vs V3 vs V4 differ structurally.
• Read a lending-market position — collateral factor, borrow APR, liquidation threshold — and predict when a position becomes liquidatable.
• Read an audit report critically: distinguish what audits cover from what they routinely miss, and rank findings by what matters.
• Recognize the four exploit classes that account for most DeFi losses (reentrancy, flash-loan price manipulation, oracle manipulation, governance attacks) by their on-chain footprint.
• Evaluate an oracle design (Chainlink, TWAP, Pyth) and identify the conditions under which it can be manipulated.
• Apply the cross-chain risk stack — sequencer, bridge, wrapped-asset backing — to any cross-chain position.
• Compute impermanent loss for a real LP position and decide when fee yield is structurally likely to compensate for it.
• Run a pre-deposit checklist that captures TVL history, audit count, admin-function controls, withdrawal limits, and oracle design.

Lessons

1. 1

   Lesson 1 — AMMs explained: Uniswap V2, V3, V4, Curve, Balancer

   ~22 min

   An automated market maker is a deterministic pricing formula plus a pool. Today: the formulas, where they differ, and where slippage actually comes from.

2. 2

   Lesson 2 — Lending markets: Aave, Compound, Morpho

   ~22 min

   Lending protocols are interest-rate curves, collateral factors, and liquidation engines bolted together. Today: how each piece works and when positions break.

3. 3

   Lesson 3 — Reading audits: what they cover, what they miss

   ~22 min

   Smart-contract audits are the most-cited 'proof of safety' in DeFi and the most over-interpreted. Today: how to read them so they tell you what they actually tell you.

4. 4

   Lesson 4 — The exploit catalogue: reentrancy, flash-loan price manipulation, governance attacks

   ~22 min

   Most DeFi losses cluster into a small set of repeating exploit classes. Today: the four most-common with named case studies.

5. 5

   Lesson 5 — Oracle design: Chainlink, TWAP, Pyth

   ~22 min

   Every DeFi exploit involving a price is, at some level, an oracle exploit. Today: how each oracle design works, where each fails, and how to read an oracle's risk surface.

6. 6

   Lesson 6 — Bridges revisited: Ronin, Wormhole, Harmony, Multichain

   ~22 min

   Bridges have caused over $2.5 billion in user losses since 2021 — the single largest exploit category in DeFi history. Today: the architectural choices and how each one failed.

7. 7

   Lesson 7 — Impermanent loss: the math, the misconception, the cases where LPing wins

   ~22 min

   Impermanent loss is the most-misunderstood concept in DeFi. Today: the actual math, when it matters, and the structural cases where fee yield genuinely compensates.

8. 8

   Lesson 8 — Pre-deposit checklist: the questions to ask before any DeFi allocation

   ~20 min

   Course closing. The 10-item checklist that captures most of the patterns we've covered, in a form you can apply to any protocol in under 20 minutes.

Final quiz

When you've worked through every lesson, pass the final quiz to mark the course complete. You can retry any number of times.