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- Aave
Protocol
Aave is a pooled lending protocol. Suppliers deposit assets into shared liquidity, borrowers post collateral, and interest follows utilization. V3 records that state in one Pool. V4 splits shared liquidity from user-facing markets and prices collateral risk on top of the utilization rate.
- Curve Finance
Protocol
Curve builds AMMs for assets that should trade near each other, and a second family for assets that should not. StableSwap uses an amplification coefficient to flatten the price near the peg. CryptoSwap concentrates liquidity around a moving price scale. Stableswap-NG is the current factory for plain pools and metapools.
- Lido
Protocol
Lido is a liquid staking protocol for ether. A deposit mints shares in a pool of validators. stETH rebases so balances track the pool. wstETH wraps those shares into a static balance. Exiting is a queued withdrawal finalized by an accounting report, not a transfer of the liquid token.
- MakerDAO / Sky
Protocol
Maker’s Vat is a ledger of collateral and stablecoin debt. A vault locks collateral, draws DAI, and pays a stability fee that accrues by raising a per-collateral rate. Sky keeps a one-for-one path between DAI and USDS and adds a savings token, sUSDS, without replacing the vault ledger with an AMM.
- Uniswap
Protocol
Uniswap is an automated market maker. A swap moves the reserves of a pool and the pool’s invariant sets the price. v2 spreads fungible liquidity across every price. v3 and v4 concentrate it between ticks. v4 keeps that pricing and changes the contracts around it: one PoolManager, flash settlement, and optional hooks.
- Aave from the V3 Pool to the V4 hub
Guide
V3 gathers supply and debt for a market inside one Pool and reprices every position when risk parameters change. V4 keeps utilization interest at an immutable hub, lets spokes define markets, and adds a collateral risk premium plus a target-health-factor liquidation.
- Curve pool generations
Guide
Curve did not ship a single V1-to-V4 exchange. It shipped an invariant for pegged assets, a later invariant for volatile assets, a factory that deploys immutable pool instances, and a separate stablecoin whose liquidation is an AMM. Those are different objects.
- Lido exits and Dual Governance
Guide
Lido withdrawals are a request, an oracle finalization, and a claim. The claim is an NFT until ETH is paid. Dual Governance, live on Ethereum since 4 July 2025 by Lido’s account, lets stETH holders escrow tokens so a DAO proposal cannot finish before they have had time to exit.
- From Maker vaults to Sky tokens
Guide
Sky did not replace the Vat with a new stablecoin design. DAI remains the internal stablecoin debt. USDS is a one-for-one ERC-20 path onto that debt. sUSDS is a savings vault. MKR converts to SKY at a fixed 24,000-to-1 rate. The vault safety check is still art times rate against ink times spot.
- Uniswap v2, v3, and v4
Guide
v2 is a fungible constant-product pair with a 0.30 percent fee. v3 keeps constant-product math inside a chosen tick range and represents positions as NFTs. v4 keeps concentrated liquidity, puts every pool in one PoolManager, settles with flash accounting, and lets a hook extend the swap.
- Automated market makers
Concept
An automated market maker prices a swap from the assets already in a pool. There is no order to match. Uniswap’s constant product and Curve’s StableSwap are two invariants on that idea, with different shapes and different LP claims.
- Collateral and liquidation
Concept
Collateral lets a protocol lend or mint against an asset it can seize. Liquidation is the seizure. Aave sizes it with a health factor and a close factor or target health factor. Maker uses art · rate against ink · spot and then an auction. crvUSD converts collateral gradually through LLAMMA.
- Transaction execution and composability
Concept
Composability means one transaction can move through several protocols before it commits. Uniswap routers chain pools. Flash accounting and flash swaps lend inventory for the duration of a call. The atomicity stops at anything that waits: an oracle report, a withdrawal queue, or a governance timelock.
- Concentrated liquidity
Concept
Concentrated liquidity is constant-product inventory that is only active between two prices. The position earns fees inside the range and holds a single asset outside it. v3 represents the position as an NFT. v4 keeps the range and changes the position manager.
- Constant-product pricing
Concept
Constant-product pricing keeps the product of two reserves from falling when a swap pays its fee. The spot price is the reserve ratio. The rule is uniform across all prices in v2, only inside a tick range in v3 and v4, and only the outer region of a Curve StableSwap pool.
- Governance and upgradeability
Concept
Governance on these protocols sets risk parameters, and sometimes replaces contract code at a stable address. Aave V3 pools and Sky’s USDS token are upgradeable. Aave V4’s hub and Uniswap’s core pools are documented as not upgradeable. Lido’s Dual Governance exists because an exit can be slower than a vote.
- Interest-rate models
Concept
Aave sets a variable borrow rate from utilization, with a kink at an optimal point and a reserve factor that skims the supplier rate. Maker sets a stability fee per collateral type and accrues it by raising a shared rate multiplier. The two are not interchangeable formulas.
- Lending pools and utilization
Concept
A lending pool holds supplied assets and lends them to borrowers who posted collateral. Utilization is borrowed liquidity over supplied liquidity. It is the input to Aave’s interest curve and the reason a nearly empty pool and a nearly full pool are different credit markets.
- Liquid staking
Concept
Liquid staking gives the depositor a transferable claim while validators earn rewards. Lido’s claim is a share of pooled ether. stETH rebases. wstETH does not. Getting ETH back is a queue finalized by an oracle, and the operators running validators are a separate trust assumption.
- Liquidity pools and LP shares
Concept
A liquidity pool holds the reserves a swap trades against. The LP share is the claim on those reserves and on fees. Uniswap v2 uses a fungible token, v3 an NFT, v4 ERC-6909 accounting, and Curve NG the pool contract itself.
- On-chain accounting
Concept
Aave scales aToken balances by a liquidity index. Maker stores normalized vault debt and multiplies by a rate. Lido prices shares by pooled ether. Curve accounts LP claims against the invariant D. The pattern is one global multiplier, updated lazily, instead of a transfer to every holder.
- Oracles and external dependencies
Concept
Lending solvency, Maker’s spot price, some Curve coin rates, and Lido’s share rate all depend on data that is not the protocol’s own invariant. The contract will enforce the wrong number faithfully. Oracle design is the choice of who may write that number and how stale it may be.
- Proxies and implementation contracts
Concept
A proxy keeps an address and a storage layout while the logic lives in another contract. Aave V3 markets and Sky’s USDS token document this pattern. Uniswap’s core pools and Aave V4’s hub are documented as non-upgradeable. Reading only the proxy address does not tell you which of those you have.
- Security assumptions
Concept
Each protocol enforces an invariant and leaves a set of assumptions outside it: prices, upgrades, operators, governance parameters, and the behavior of other contracts in the same transaction. Naming those assumptions is part of reading the design. It is not a finding that the design has failed.
- Stablecoin mechanisms
Concept
A collateralized stablecoin is debt. Maker mints it against a vault and charges a stability fee. Sky’s USDS is a one-for-one token on that same debt. A Curve StableSwap pool only trades stablecoins. crvUSD is a third design that liquidates through an AMM.
- Amplification coefficient
Glossary
The parameter A in Curve StableSwap. Larger values pull the pricing curve closer to a constant sum while balances remain near the peg, which reduces slippage for similarly priced assets and makes the price fall faster once balances diverge.
- aToken
Glossary
The interest-bearing claim minted by an Aave V3 market when a user supplies an asset. The token is pegged one-for-one to the underlying asset in the protocol’s accounting, and the balance grows as the reserve’s liquidity index grows.
- Bad debt
Glossary
Debt that remains after the collateral securing it has been exhausted. In a lending pool it is a loss shared through the reserve; in Aave V4 the overview calls the comparable shortfall a deficit that spokes can eliminate from supplied shares.
- Close factor
Glossary
The fraction of a borrower’s debt that a single liquidation may repay. Aave’s V4 overview describes V3’s default close factor as 50 percent, with a 100 percent close factor in specified unhealthy or small-position cases. V4 replaces that default with a target health factor.
- Collateral factor
Glossary
A risk parameter that limits how much of an asset’s value counts toward borrowing power. Aave V4 stores collateralization parameters, including the collateral factor, in dynamic configuration keys so a change can apply to new positions without rewriting every open position.
- Concentrated liquidity
Glossary
Liquidity that is active only between two prices. Uniswap v3 introduced it, and v4 keeps the same pricing idea: a position earns fees only while the pool price is inside its range, and outside that range the position holds only one of the two assets.
- Constant product
Glossary
The invariant x · y = k used by Uniswap v2. A swap changes the two reserves but may not decrease the product after the fee. The marginal price is the ratio of the reserves, so larger trades move the price more.
- CryptoSwap
Glossary
Curve’s invariant for assets that are not expected to hold a peg. It keeps liquidity concentrated around an internal price scale and changes shape away from that scale through the amplification coefficient and gamma. It is a different pool family from StableSwap.
- DAI
Glossary
The stablecoin accounted for by Maker’s Vat. Vault debt is denominated in DAI, and the Sky documentation describes a converter that exchanges DAI and USDS one-for-one in both directions with no fee.
- Dutch auction
Glossary
A sale that starts at a high price and falls until a buyer accepts it. Aave V4 uses the phrase for a liquidation bonus that increases as health factor falls. Maker’s collateral auctions are a separate implementation in the dss liquidation contracts.
- Efficiency mode
Glossary
An Aave V3 category for correlated assets, often called eMode. Positions that opt into a category can use the category’s collateral parameters instead of the looser parameters that must work for every asset in the market.
- ERC-4626
Glossary
A tokenized-vault interface with deposit, mint, withdraw, redeem, and share-to-asset conversion. Sky’s sUSDS contract implements it for the Sky Savings Rate. Curve Stableswap-NG can also treat an ERC-4626 token as an asset type whose rate comes from convertToAssets.
- Flash accounting
Glossary
Uniswap v4’s practice of recording token deltas during a PoolManager unlock and transferring tokens only at settlement. A multi-hop swap can therefore avoid moving the intermediate token between pools.
- Health factor
Glossary
Aave’s scalar for whether a borrower’s collateral still covers their debt after risk parameters. The V4 documentation sets the liquidation threshold of this factor at 1. Below that, a liquidation call is eligible.
- Hook
Glossary
An optional contract attached to a Uniswap v4 pool. The hook address is part of the pool key and is fixed when the pool is initialized. It can run before or after initialize, liquidity changes, swaps, and donations, and only if the pool’s permission flags allow that callback.
- Hub
Glossary
The immutable liquidity coordinator in Aave V4. It tracks supplied and borrowed shares for each asset, sets spoke add and draw caps, applies the utilization-based drawn rate, and enforces the accounting invariants described in the V4 overview.
- Isolation mode
Glossary
An Aave V3 constraint for a risky collateral. A user who enables an isolated asset as collateral can borrow only the assets governance has listed for that isolation setting, and only up to a debt ceiling.
- Liquidation bonus
Glossary
Extra collateral transferred to a liquidator beyond the value of the debt repaid. In Aave V3 the bonus is a static reserve parameter. In V4 it varies with health factor between a minimum and a configured maximum.
- Liquidation threshold
Glossary
The percentage of collateral value that debt may reach before a position can be liquidated. It is distinct from the loan-to-value used to open a borrow: a position can be forbidden from borrowing more and still be above the liquidation threshold.
- Liquidity index
Glossary
The cumulative supply-interest multiplier for an Aave reserve. Supplier balances are stored in scaled units and converted to underlying units by this index, so interest does not require a token transfer to each supplier.
- Liquidity pool
Glossary
A contract that holds reserves of two or more assets and prices swaps against those reserves. The pool’s accounting, not an order book, determines the execution price. Different protocols represent the liquidity provider’s claim as an ERC-20, an NFT, or an internal share.
- LP share
Glossary
A liquidity provider’s claim on a pool. Uniswap v2 mints a fungible ERC-20. Uniswap v3 records a ranged position as an NFT. Curve Stableswap-NG uses the pool contract itself as the LP token. The share is a claim on pool assets and fees, not a promise of the tokens originally deposited.
- Metapool
Glossary
A Curve pool that pairs one asset with the LP token of another Curve pool. A trader can swap the new asset against any coin inside the base pool, while the base pool’s liquidity stays in its own contract.
- Node operator
Glossary
An organization or module participant that runs validators for a liquid staking protocol. Lido does not operate every validator itself. Rewards, penalties, and liveness depend on those operators and on Ethereum’s consensus rules.
- Normalized debt
Glossary
Maker’s art field: vault debt stored before the stability-fee multiplier. Current debt is art multiplied by the collateral type’s rate. Updating the rate updates every vault of that type without writing each vault.
- Oracle
Glossary
A contract or committee that brings an off-chain or cross-domain observation on chain, such as a price, a validator balance, or a collateral exchange rate. The observation is an input to solvency or accounting. It is not enforced by the AMM or lending invariant itself.
- Peg stability module
Glossary
A Maker facility that swaps DAI with an approved external stablecoin at a fixed rate, within a debt ceiling. Sky’s current token-route documentation points integrators to LitePSM for DAI–USDC and a USDS–USDC wrapper. It is not a vault and it does not price the swap on a curve.
- Proxy
Glossary
A contract whose address stays fixed while a separate implementation contract holds the logic. Calls are delegated to the implementation. Aave V3 markets and Sky’s USDS token use this pattern. Uniswap’s core pools are documented as non-upgradeable instead.
- Rebase
Glossary
A balance update that changes how many tokens an account holds without a transfer. stETH rebases when Lido’s accounting report changes the value of each share. wstETH avoids that by keeping a static balance whose stETH value changes.
- Reserve factor
Glossary
The share of borrow interest that an Aave reserve diverts to the treasury rather than to suppliers. Because of it, the supply rate is lower than utilization multiplied by the borrow rate.
- Risk premium
Glossary
In Aave V4, extra borrow interest determined by the collateral a user actually relies on. The protocol sorts collateral from safer to riskier, covers the debt with the safer assets first, and charges a premium from that weighted collateral risk. The premium is tracked with extra debt shares, not as a second token the user holds.
- Share
Glossary
A unit of ownership in a pooled balance. Lido mints stETH shares when ether is submitted. The stETH balance is the shares priced at the current pooled-ether rate. Curve and Aave also use share or scaled-balance accounting, but the rate that reprices the share is different in each system.
- Sky Savings Rate
Glossary
The governance-set rate paid to USDS deposited in the sUSDS vault. Sky’s documentation describes it as funded by protocol revenue and distinct from a utilization curve. sUSDS is the ERC-4626 token for that deposit.
- Spoke
Glossary
An upgradeable, user-facing lending module in Aave V4. Users call the spoke. The spoke draws and returns liquidity at a hub, applies its own oracle and collateral configuration, and can be added or halted without moving the hub’s reserves to a new contract.
- Stability fee
Glossary
The interest rate on Maker vault debt. The Jug stores a per-second rate. Calling drip folds the accrued multiplier into the Vat’s rate for that collateral type, which increases art · rate for every vault of that type and credits the system surplus.
- StableSwap
Glossary
Curve’s invariant for assets that should trade near a common price. It blends a constant-sum region, controlled by the amplification coefficient, with constant-product behavior when the pool is imbalanced.
- stETH
Glossary
Lido’s rebasing liquid staking token. A holder’s balance changes when the protocol’s share rate changes. The balance represents a claim on pooled ether, including rewards and penalties, not a fixed one-to-one claim on a specific validator.
- sUSDS
Glossary
Savings USDS, an ERC-4626 vault for the Sky Savings Rate. Depositing USDS mints shares. The share price accrues with the savings rate. Sky’s token routes note that sUSDS and the older sDAI token are not one-for-one claims on each other.
- Tick
Glossary
A discrete price boundary in Uniswap v3 and v4. Tick i represents the price 1.0001^i, so one initialized step of one tick is one basis point. Pools only initialize ticks on a spacing that depends on the fee tier.
- USDS
Glossary
Sky’s upgrade of DAI. The official converter exchanges it with DAI at one-to-one, with no fee, and the documentation says a fee cannot be enabled on that route later. The token contract is upgradeable through a UUPS proxy.
- Utilization
Glossary
Borrowed liquidity divided by supplied liquidity in a lending reserve. Aave’s interest strategy uses it as the main input to the borrow rate: rates rise slowly up to an optimal utilization and faster after that.
- Variable debt token
Glossary
The non-transferable token that records variable-rate debt in an Aave V3 market. Its balance is principal plus accrued borrow interest. The V3 pool documentation says new borrows pass interest-rate mode 2, the variable mode. Stable-rate mode is deprecated.
- Vault
Glossary
A Maker position stored in the Vat as an urn: ink is locked collateral and art is normalized debt. The vault is not an ERC-4626 vault. sUSDS is a separate tokenized savings vault.
- Withdrawal request
Glossary
A Lido queue entry that burns or locks stETH and later pays ETH. The request is an ERC-721 called unstETH. It can be claimed only after the accounting oracle finalizes it.
- wstETH
Glossary
Wrapped stETH. The wrapper locks stETH and mints a balance equal to the underlying shares, so the balance does not rebase. Its value in stETH rises when the share rate rises. Lido’s integration guide recommends it for contracts that assume a static ERC-20 balance.