Decentralized Finance (DeFi) Opportunities and Risks

Course Overview

DeFi and the Future of Finance is a set of four courses that focus on decentralized finance. The final course is called DeFi Opportunities and Risks. It is essential that you complete the first three courses: I. DeFi Infrastructure; II. DeFi Primitives; and III. DeFi Deep Dive before beginning the fourth course. The course starts with the premise that an analysis of any new technology must clearly gauge the risks and challenges. Given that DeFi is only a few years old there are plenty of risks. The course begins with the most obvious risk: smart contract risk. Smart contracts are foundational for DeFi. The code of these contracts is public - opening a clear attack vector for hackers. That is, in traditional finance, hackers need to break into a system to get access to the code and data. In DeFi, everything is open source.There are many other risks studied including: Governance risk; Oracle risk; Scaling risk; Decentralized Exchange or DEX risk; Custodial risk; Environmental risk; and Regulatory risk.