DeFi (Decentralized Finance)

DeFi (Decentralized Finance) is the broad category of financial services — lending, borrowing, trading, derivatives, asset management — built on public blockchains via smart contracts, without traditional intermediaries like banks or brokers. Examples include Aave, Compound, Uniswap, MakerDAO, and many others. DeFi matters to tokenized domains because once a domain is represented as an NFT, it can be used as collateral in NFT-aware lending protocols, traded on decentralized markets, or composed with any other on-chain primitive. The flip side: DeFi positions are public, often non-custodial, and the user is responsible for managing risk — liquidations are automatic. See Use Cases for Tokenized Domains in 2026 for how lending and other DeFi patterns apply specifically to domains. Reference: Ethereum.org's DeFi explainer.