Reference
Concepts
These articles name the shared idea, then say where Aave, Uniswap, Maker, Curve, or Lido depart from it.
Markets
- → Automated market makers
What an AMM prices, which state it stores, and how Uniswap and Curve implement different invariants.
- → Liquidity pools and LP shares
How a liquidity provider’s claim is tracked in Uniswap v2, Uniswap v3 and v4, and Curve NG pools.
- → Constant-product pricing
How the x · y = k invariant sets a Uniswap v2 price, and where v3 and Curve stop using it uniformly.
- → Concentrated liquidity
How Uniswap v3 and v4 confine LP capital to a tick range, and what happens when price leaves it.
Credit
- → Lending pools and utilization
How a shared lending pool measures utilization and why that ratio, not an order book, sets borrower competition.
- → Interest-rate models
How Aave’s two-slope utilization curve differs from Maker’s governance-set stability fee.
- → Collateral and liquidation
How Aave, Maker, and Curve’s crvUSD decide that a position is unsafe and what the liquidator actually receives.
Monetary systems
- → Stablecoin mechanisms
How DAI and USDS are minted against collateral, and why a Curve stablecoin pool is a different object.
- → Liquid staking
How a liquid staking token represents pooled validator deposits, and why a transfer is not a withdrawal.
Engineering
- → Governance and upgradeability
Which protocol changes are parameter updates, which are proxy upgrades, and which cores are documented as immutable.
- → Oracles and external dependencies
Where Aave, Maker, Curve, and Lido take an input the chain cannot see, and what fails when that input is wrong.
- → Proxies and implementation contracts
How a stable address can delegate to replaceable logic, and which of these protocols use that pattern.
- → On-chain accounting
Why these protocols store scaled balances, normalized debt, and shares instead of rewriting every account.
- → Transaction execution and composability
How one Ethereum transaction can call a router, a pool, and a lending market, and where that atomicity stops.
- → Security assumptions
The assumptions these protocols still require, grouped so a design is not described as trustless by default.