Category: 1. What is a flash loan?

One of the weaknesses of the current DEFI model is the difficulty of applications built on Smart Contracts getting data from the outside world, most importantly price data.  Any application that offers token swaps, for example, needs to know the current exchange rate, so will reference an Oracle, a service that feeds this data, via API,… Continue reading How Flash Loan Attacks Work

There are legitimate reasons why someone would want to utilise a Flash Loan, which would benefit them and the wider DEFI ecosystem. Here’s an example from Aave’s website where a Flash Loan enables the swapping of collateral for a MakerDAO Vault: In this case, the user holds a collateralised ETH position with MakerDAO but wants to swap… Continue reading The Good & Bad of Flash Loans

Flash Loans have emerged as the existing approaches within TradFi have blended with the technical realities of DEFI. Decentralised Finance has grown so fast because of the composable nature of the Ethereum ecosystem, within which it exists. Composability is the ability of different components to seamlessly integrate; DEFI is often described as financial lego. Applications… Continue reading Developers are the new Masters of Universe

Michael Lewis is one of the greatest financial journalists of the last 30 years, most celebrated for his book ‘The Big Short’ about the build-up to the 2008 financial crisis, later made into a film with Brad Pitt and Christian Bale.  He followed up on that success with another equally important book in 2014, Flash… Continue reading Time is Money

A flash loan is a way to borrow crypto funds from a lending pool without the need for collateral, provided the liquidity is returned before the underlying chain confirms transactions in the next block.  Flash Loans are therefore a form of unsecured loan used to fund complex chains of instant, programmed trades exploiting arbitrage within… Continue reading What is a flash loan?