Tutorial
DeFi Building Blocks
Speaker: Lewis Gudgeon, Daniel Perez, Dragos Ilie, Sam Werner
Date: Tuesday, July 12th
Abstract:
Want to learn how to DeFi? In this tutorial on Decentralized Finance (DeFi) we will first survey the state of the art in DeFi, synthesizing and evaluating some of its key technical innovations, before presenting a taxonomy of the major protocols. This will be based on the Systematization of Knowledge (SoK) coauthored by several of the presenters. We will then turn to a live coding portion of the tutorial where we will showcase a number of pieces of DeFi program logic, highlighting important programming patterns and capabilities of DeFi protocols at present. The aim is to provide newcomers to DeFi with an expansive and insightful tour of the field.
Lewis Gudgeon
Lewis is a Computer Science PhD candidate at Imperial College, publishing mainly on DeFi risks. Prior to this he worked as an economics consultant. He holds an MPhil in Economics Research from the University of Cambridge and a BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Warwick University.
Dragos Ilie
Dragos is a PhD candidate at Imperial College, researching Blockchain security and consensus protocols. He published work on Bitcoin’s vulnerability against quantum computing and protocols to transition current blockchains to a quantum resistant scheme. As a software developer, he worked extensively on DeFi projects, designing Smart Contract architectures and building systems that interact with multiple DeFi building blocks.
Daniel Perez
Daniel is a software engineer with 10+ years of experience and open-source advocate with over 3,000 GitHub stars. Currently Daniel is finishing up his PhD at Imperial College London, where his research is on the security of blockchain systems and applications.
Sam Werner
Sam is a PhD student in the Centre for Cryptocurrency Research and Engineering at Imperial College, supervised by Prof William Knottenbelt. In his research he is trying to answer questions around incentive structures found in blockchain systems, ranging from mining pools to DeFi protocols. His latest research work includes a Systematisation of Knowledge on DeFi, examining different types of economic and technical security risks found in DeFi protocols.