Economics
How value gets created, priced, and moved. Four sections sit beneath this one, and they divide finance in three: how the machinery works, what the law permits it to do, and how both get abused.
DeFi is the largest section of the wiki, where the primitives — currency, lending, market making, and options — are rebuilt on public blockchains, with a smart contract in place of a clearing house.
Payments is the machinery the rebuild is measured against — the rails that already move a trillion dollars a year between ordinary American bank accounts, and Zelle in particular, which arrived at irrevocable instant settlement by a completely different route and inherited a recognisably similar set of problems.
Regulation is the constraint both run into. It covers US financial regulation from the builder’s side: the Bank Secrecy Act and the anti-money-laundering regime built on it, who counts as a money services business, where rules written for correspondent banking stop fitting a permissionless ledger, and which agency a token or a protocol answers to when it looks like a security or a derivative.
Fraud is what the other three produce between them. Irreversible settlement, permissionless issuance, and identity that exists only at the edges combine into a set of frauds that are individually old — Ponzi schemes, pump and dump, wash trading — and collectively cost US victims a reported $9.3 billion in 2024. The section is organised by mechanism rather than by loss: what the fraud does to the token, the offering, the holder, or the proceeds.
All four are finance. The section is scoped wider than that — monetary systems, incentives and mechanism design, and the economics of running computation at scale — and a subject that is economics without being finance gets a sibling to these four rather than a home inside one of them. Two neighbours hold material a reader might look for here: the cryptography a chain is built out of is Computer Science — content addressing, zero-knowledge proofs — and keeping a deploy key off disk is Security.