I love DeFi 201 as it answers many of the questions I had after completing the first course. It’s hard to see events like Black Thursday sweep away some of the naïveté from the space but the resulting ecosystem is such much stronger.
You can also insure your deposits at the cost of your interest rate of course. Have a look into Opyn. This protocol gives you the opportunity to insure your deposit of DAI, and even to provide insurance.
When you insure your funds, interest rate will drop from 8% to around 5%. Still a hell of a deal compared to the negative interest rates you will get from your local bank. Opyn
Even more interesting in my opinion is Nexus Mututal, as it has legal backing. So to me their systems looks pretty straight forward and seems to provide a high level of transparency and safety.
I’d suggest Celsius Network. They grant asset-backed loans to Institutions etc.
Transparency is their pillar of operation.
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I have been going down the rabbit hole with flash loans learning all the different types such as collateral, liquidation, and arbitrage flash loans. One of the most exciting projects out now is called FuruCombo. FuruCombo is way to create flash loans and other smart contracts without even knowing how to program. Recently they had a hack due to the a fault in the verification of wallet, but I feel they will jump back better than ever. Furucombo is like Lego’s for defi I encourage everyone to check it out. https://furucombo.app/combo
I just watched a video on how Facebook became the social media giant it is today, and I found it interesting that the presenter mentioned a certain feature that contributed to the platform’s growth: a game called FarmVille.
I’ve also been going through some of the projects listed on “Everest.link”, namely the gaming ones as that is an expertise of mine, and I’ve come to the conclusion that if anything defi-related is going to get mainstream adoption (in developed nations), it will be gaming.
When I look at the games they are releasing, I think developers would do much better if they could integrate their blockchain “solution” with already existing games/franchises, who presumably have bigger marketing budgets and more highly skilled game designers, artists etc. The problem then, would be them needing to convince the gaming corporations of the uses of blockchain. It might just be easier to wait for society to understand the importance of blockchain, and have the blockchain solution ready for when corporations scramble to incorporate some kind of blockchain within their ecosystem, looking for the next thing to hype up and sell (as an example: I remember stores selling portable battery packs for mobile phones when Pokemon Go became a global sensation). A good example I’m interested in and would like to try in the near future is Gods Unchained. That seems to tick all the boxes for a successful game.
I’ve now come across the term “play to earn”, which is something I jokingly brought up amongst family conversation before I’d heard of the term. Business models in the gaming industry have evolved from pay to play (standard video games), to freemium (free, but pay for faster progress), to now/soon play to earn. How will society change once everyday people, absolved of their duties at work thanks to AI, can earn a little extra income on the side just by playing their favourite blockchain-based games?
NFTs have caught mainstream attention (see Beeple’s record-breaking NFT sale) but I haven’t seen a compelling investment opportunity in that space myself. I’m sure digital art and NFTs will do as well, but personally I’m more interested in the art itself as opposed to owning art for investment purposes or bragging rights, so I’m not compelled to financially invest in this space.
A passing comment: I’m not yet sure that dapps are at the point where your average Joe Bloggs can use them.
The thought just came to me that perhaps a large unsolved problem is not that the data/stats isn’t out there in an easy to read form (e.g. graphs), but that globally people are, in general, financially illiterate.
All this financial info is perfect for someone with a background in economics/trading,
but I’m not sure your average person can handle the concept of saving - or at least execute the concept successfully - never mind leverage “basic” financial instruments such as RSI or MACD. Maybe we still need education to catch up so that people can take advantage of the opportunity right in front of them. And by education, I don’t mean “schools”, nor am I excluding them. Youtube, podcasts, and TikTok are all platforms that millions of users consume daily, and are a good way for people to learn the financial basics.
A final passing comment: are zoomers (Gen Z) onboard the defi hype train? I hope they know what their future entails.
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I heard about Hedera Hashgraph a few months ago so decided to diver deeper into the project. Hedera is a public distributed ledger that uses hashgraph consensus, a faster, more secure alternative to blockchain consensus mechanisms. It prides itself on its low-latency, high throughput (10,000+ tx per second) performance all the while being completely transparent.
A boast from their website:
“Hedera is unique in that it achieves the same result as the most ubiquitous public blockchains (such as Bitcoin or Ethereum), but in a way that is faster, fairer, and more energy efficient, stable, and secure — these advantages can be attributed to the underlying hashgraph consensus algorithm and the global enterprise governing body, which owns and operates Hedera today.”
https://hedera.com/learning/what-is-hedera-hashgraph
Instead of a proof-of-work algorithm Hedera have coined a gossip-about-gossip and virtual voting mechanism that is more energy efficient, faster and safer than the vulnerable and slow PoW blockchain. They are partnered with a growing number of well established tech giants and they are making noise in the finance world.
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Really great to get an overview through your in depth video’s Amadeo! Learning a lot about how the space and its projects are all interconnected. I would really want to recomment another really cool project which is called Orion procotol: a full crypto market liquidity aggregator and exchange (All Dexes Cexes and swap pools should be integrated any time soon). What do you think about this project @amadeobrands? 
Great to follow your classes on the Defi space, probably Cardano according to their roadmap will launch soon smart contracts Goguen Roadmap soon and also Iota IOTA Smart contracts testing so the decentralized space is increasing.Would be great to find out ways to connect these technologies to the liquidity from other platforms like Etherium.
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Hi Amadeobrands, than for the nice contents. In one of your lessons you talk about Atomica.org
Very interesting project in my opinion. I have seen that the TVL is very low. Is that project still alive or not? Or is TVL so low because the app is still in Beta?
thanks . Centrfigue just launched as a bridge between defi and CEFI
https://youtu.be/23nQWgO4AfA,
converting real world assets into pools. awesome.
Tinlake is being used to enable this conversion( to NFTs -imagine your invoices being converted to NFTs so you can borrow against this on Maker) enabling asset access through proof of consumption in supply chain & unlocking locked up finance enablement. . I think its on polkadot.
ERC-721o looks like a great idea. Combining ERC-721 and ERC-20 to mirror how derivatives such as options are traded. You have a number of contracts, which are not fungible with each other, but can each be traded fungibly.
"a composable multiclass token standard. A standard that enables all kinds of different non-interchangeable tokens, much like ERC-721, where each can be minted in any quantity, and is interchangeable with its “twins”.
Hi Amadeo
Thank you for the great content! The concept of TCR’s is quite exciting and it’s not difficult to imagine a whole lot of use cases, eg businesses in particular industries, information (websites, videos etc) on a variety of topics. Applied properly, a TCR could lead to very useful, unbiased and well researched lists for users to take advantage of.
I am someone with prior programming experience, and I am really excited to see how programming on blockchain would be like. Especially excited for the flash loans part.
Looking forward to yield farming topic. Making interest on the invested token for providing liquidity.
Making money doing nothing 
.
I have interacted with a few defi protocols in the past couple of years but I find the gas fees in Ethereum prohibitive for Defi newbies like myself to experiment with smaller amounts of crypto to get their feet wet. I have also used Aave/Polygon which was far cheaper than ETH but it was time consuming bridging between chains and then ultimately paying ETH gas fees to bridge back and forth. Solana and other blockchains may offer up some good Defi alternatives but I think Defi will become more popular to the wider public as it becomes easier to interact with, less confusion bridging back and forth and the improved interoperability between the different blockchains. A single currency that could be used and recognized on any chain would be game changing but I have no idea if that will ever be possible. I continue to learn every day in this space and that’s what makes it fascinating. Looking forward to seeing what’s around the corner.
Hello @amadeobrands
The course, your presentation, links etc are great and I am really enjoying them! 
Thanks for that.
I have a question regarding your slides, is it intentional that some of them are locked and not downloadable?
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Hi Amadeo! I’m watching DeFi 201 right now and I’m wondering about how to learn more about on-chain data. What sources are you currently using to look at and analyze data, and are there any courses or programs specifically for learning to analyze on chain data that you recommend? Thank you in advance!
Hey has anyone used the everest.link, the token-curated register that Amadeo mentioned? I’m trying to figure it out. For example, the hedge fund Pantera is listed (link) – what’s the purpose of the ID number? Is this just meant to be a registry of any crypto-related project?
@amadeobrands I really enjoyed your resume about the DeFi ecosystem. I have gone throw all the additional content you provide us, and I really enjoy getting into a mayor understanding about Decentralize Finance, and how the mayor DeFi, protocols operate. The podcast I have already listened were awesome (the Uma and Balancer one is my favorite at the moment).
The TRC model I think is very simple compared to other models. And the only con I see in this model is the initial adoption.
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