Decentralised finance — financial services built as public smart contracts rather than by licensed intermediaries.
Last verified 13 September 2026 · written by the DexLadder team
What it means
Decentralised finance — financial services built as public smart contracts rather than by licensed intermediaries.
Why it matters when you trade
DeFi replaces institutional trust with code and incentives, which removes gatekeepers and adds new failure modes: contract bugs, oracle manipulation, governance capture and economic designs that only work while incentives last. The services are genuinely composable, and composability means one failure can propagate through everything built on top of it.
Worked example
A lending market, a DEX and a yield vault stacked together inherit each other's risks; the weakest contract sets the ceiling.
See it on live markets
DexLadder runs defi against live market and pool data, with simulated capital, so you can watch it act on an order instead of reading about it — no account, no wallet, nothing installed.