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Learn DeFi & Web3 by Doing

Hands-on primers and interactive tools distilling 25+ years of institutional finance and Web3 experience into things you can actually use.

Most resources for learning DeFi are built for developers or speculative retail investors: not for people who understand balance sheets, risk committees, and regulatory frameworks. These tools are built differently. They start from the assumption that you already know how finance works and translate blockchain mechanics into concepts you can anchor to your existing knowledge: liquidity pools explained through market-making parallels, protocol risk framed as a variant of counterparty risk, yield calculation presented the way a fixed-income analyst would approach it.

Each tool has been built from first principles and validated against 25+ years of institutional experience, across Citibank's transformation programs in APAC and EMEA, TRM Labs' blockchain risk intelligence work across eight Asian markets, and the self-custody risk function at a top-3 global crypto exchange. The goal is not to make you a blockchain developer. It is to make you effective in a boardroom conversation about digital assets: able to ask the right questions and recognise an incomplete answer.

Who These Tools Are For

Finance Professionals Crossing Over

Bankers, asset managers, and fund administrators who need a working mental model of DeFi to evaluate digital asset opportunities, manage crypto-facing client relationships, or contribute meaningfully to internal Web3 strategy, without a six-month learning curve or a computer science background.

Board Members and Executives

Directors and C-suite leaders who need to understand what their teams are building, what risks they are approving, and how to ask informed questions when blockchain topics land on the agenda. Digital literacy at the board level is now a governance expectation, not an optional upgrade.

Investors and Allocators

Family offices, endowments, and wealth advisors evaluating direct crypto allocations or DeFi exposure who need a risk-calibrated analytical framework: not hype, not speculation, and not a developer tutorial. Tools built for the same conversations that happen in investment committees.

Custody Live

Self-Custody Risk Guide

Self-custody risk is one of the most consequential and least understood risk categories in digital assets, responsible for a significant share of the $3.4 billion stolen in 2025 and an estimated 20% of all Bitcoin permanently lost. This guide is built for risk officers, compliance professionals, and board members who need to understand what institutional self-custody risk actually is: not a technology problem, but a governance problem with technology dimensions. It covers the seven risk categories (private key management, smart contract vulnerabilities, operational error, regulatory compliance, inheritance and succession, network-level failures, and cybersecurity), four regulatory frameworks (FATF Travel Rule, MiCA, Basel III, SEC), five case studies from Mt. Gox to FTX, and an eight-step institutional framework. Every claim is verified against at least two independent sources. Written by the Global Head of Self Custody Risk at a top-3 global crypto exchange.

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Yield Live

DeFi Yield Calculator

Before any investment committee considers a DeFi allocation, it needs answers to one question: is the extra yield worth the extra risk? This calculator provides a framework to find out. Enter your investment amount and select a risk appetite (conservative, moderate, or aggressive) and it maps current DeFi protocol yields against T-bills, high-yield savings accounts, and corporate bonds in a side-by-side comparison. Each option includes a plain-English breakdown of what the incremental return requires you to accept: smart contract exposure, liquidity risk, token price volatility, or protocol governance risk. Built for CFOs, family offices, and investment advisors who need to present a crypto allocation to an investment committee, not justify it to themselves.

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Reference Live

DeFi Glossary

86 core DeFi and Web3 terms defined in plain English for finance professionals. Not a developer glossary: every definition starts from the institutional finance perspective and flags where the standard analogy breaks down. Covers AMMs, flash loans, restaking, oracles, MEV, private keys, rollups, RWAs, and more — with internal links to deeper analysis where relevant.

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The TradFi Bridge Methodology

Every tool here starts from the same premise: the terminology of decentralised finance is genuinely foreign to most institutional finance professionals, but the underlying concepts are not. Liquidity pools have structural parallels in market-making operations. Lending protocols are built on the same collateralisation logic as repo markets. Smart contract risk is a form of counterparty risk with different failure modes, specifically the failure mode where the counterparty is not a party at all but a piece of code that cannot be sued.

The TradFi Bridge methodology translates each Web3 concept into its nearest institutional finance equivalent before explaining where the analogy breaks down. This creates a cognitive scaffold that lets experienced finance professionals build real understanding quickly, without the wrong intuitions that come from treating everything as entirely new, and without the oversimplifications that come from treating everything as entirely familiar.

If you work on self-custody risk specifically, the companion resource at Self-Custody Risk Guide covers institutional frameworks, regulatory obligations, and the case studies in depth.