Skill levels
DeFi Enjoyer

DeFi Enjoyer

If you've already had some experience with DeFi there are many different directions you could take to continue exploring and building in this space – as a developer, founder, investor, or community member.

Projects

Euler Finance

### What Euler is a non-custodial permissionless protocol on Ethereum that allows users to lend and borrow almost any crypto asset. Euler helps users to earn interest on their crypto assets or hedge against volatile markets without the need for a trusted third-party. ### Why? Euler introduces a number of new features in DeFi, including permissionless lending markets, protected collateral, reactive interest rates, per-second compounding interests and feeless flash loans. #### Permisionless listing Euler lets its users determine which assets are listed. Any asset that has a WETH pair on Uniswap v3 can be added as a lending market on Euler. #### Protected Collateral On Compound and Aave, collateral deposited to the protocol is always made available for lending. On the other hand, Euler allows collateral to be deposited, but not made available for lending. This collateral is 'protected'. It doesn't earn interest, but is free from the risks of borrowers defaulting, can always be withdrawn instantly, and helps protect against borrowers using tokens to influence governance decisions. #### Reactive interest rates Euler uses control theory to autonomously change the interest rates towards a level that maximises utilisation of assets in the protocol. These reactive interest rates adapt to market conditions for the asset in real-time without the need for ongoing governance intervention. #### Compound Interest Compound interest is accrued on Euler each second. This is different from other lending protocols, where interest is typically accrued every block. Earning interest per-second is generally expected to perform more predictably in the long-run, even if upgrades to Ethereum lead to changes in the average time between blocks. #### Feeless Flash Loans Euler only charges fees according to the time value of money, and from the blockchain's perspective flash loans are held for a duration of 0 seconds. Thus, they are entirely free on Euler (ignoring gas costs).
www.euler.finance

MASQ

MASQ is a dMeshVPN, browser, dAppStore, protocol, and earning ecosystem that makes living in Web3 anonymous and private. MASQ makes it easy for you to access the truly global internet and web3 dApps with our cutting-edge decentralized privacy network and Web3 Browser! The MASQ Network delivers borderless browsing to its users through encrypted peer networking - all working on top of the normal internet without special hardware - by pooling together everyone's internet connections from around the world in a mesh network structure to create a truly global internet. ### Why The internet space is not what it used to be! You are tracked almost everywhere you go and your browsing habits are monetized to the highest bidder. Even worse, internet service providers and entire regions are being restricted or blocked from allowing their citizens to access the whole internet landscape as it was originally intended! Being able to have freedom of access with privacy by default is what MASQ is all about! ### Risk MASQ Network operates at a security level above VPN, and all traffic is encrypted using industry standard TCP connections. The networking protocol is so private that there is no way to determine how many users are on the network, or where traffic is being transported to and from! Users sharing their bandwidth can also filter the content access by choosing family friendly and safe DNS servers when setting up. ### Reward By sharing your internet bandwidth to the MASQ Network, you gain tokens from peers who are securely accessing the clear web from your region of the world - in the most simplest sense you share your digital freedom with those that need it and gain tokens from those users!
masqbrowser.com

Onchain know-how

What DeFi insurance is

Insurance is a way for people to protect themselves from potential risks. You buy insurance from an insurance company for some fee, and if an accident occurs, the company compensates you. Insurance companies are essentially a way for people to socialise their risks (e.g. illness, by pooling their money together. In DeFi, just as there are decentralised protocols built for people to lend out and/or exchange their tokens, there are insurance protocols where one can buy insurance against accidents on the blockchain — or put their funds in the insurance pools to cover others from losses in exchange for rewards. Insurance is still a nascent and fairly niche sector in crypto. DeFi insurance products typically give cover for smart contract failures (exploited bugs). While this is certainly a considerable risk when using DeFi in general, the cost of buying DeFi insurance on top of (for example) a DeFi loan is simply not worth the extra work for many people. As the industry evolves, we may see a broader use of insurance contracts issued on blockchains. Ironically, decentralised insurance applications may be exploitable themselves.

How to DeFi

Layer two

Layer 2 (L2) is a collective term to describe various types of scaling solutions for the base blockchains or Layer 1s (L1). A Layer 2 is a separate blockchain that extends their native L1 and inherits the security guarantees of it. Examples of Layer 2s are the Lightning Network for Bitcoin, and the numerous "rollups" for Ethereum such as Optimistic Rollups and Zero-Knowledge Rollups. Blockchain systems offer great technological benefits for money transfers and record-keeping in general; the main properties most often considered are decentralisation, trust– and permissionlessness, censorship resistance and immutability. These desired properties of decentralised networks come at the cost of limited throughput, however. Scaling solutions to blockchains are an advanced topic with much ongoing research and development. The technical descriptions and differences between each is beyond the scope of this explainer, but they are well worth researching for the curious.
DeFi Enjoyer
technology