Blockchain Books
How to DeFi: Beginner
A Step-by-Step Guide to Decentralized Finance
CoinGecko's hands-on intro to lending, AMMs, yield farming and the basic plumbing of DeFi.
CoinGecko's How to DeFi: Beginner is the most widely-circulated entry point into decentralized finance for non-developers, written by their research team and updated through 2021. The format is utilitarian: short chapters per primitive (decentralized exchanges, lending, derivatives, stablecoins, yield aggregators), with concrete walkthroughs of using actual products like Uniswap, Aave, MakerDAO and Yearn. It assumes you can hold ETH in a wallet and not much else.
Who it's for
Crypto-curious readers who have used a centralized exchange and want to understand what people are doing on-chain. It's also useful for people working in adjacent fields — TradFi, fintech, policy — who need a vocabulary for "what is a liquidity pool, actually" and don't want to assemble it from Twitter threads. Developers will find it too shallow.
What it does well
The step-by-step product walkthroughs are the real value. Each protocol section ends with a how-to that takes you through swapping on Uniswap, depositing into Aave, opening a MakerDAO vault, and so on, with screenshots. For a reader who has never connected a wallet to a dApp, that's a meaningful confidence boost. The glossary and the side-by-side comparisons of comparable protocols (different DEXes, different lending markets) are genuinely useful reference material.
Where it falls short
It's a 2021 book about a fast-moving 2021 ecosystem. Specific yields, TVL numbers, and even some protocols have shifted significantly — Yearn's aggressive strategies, Curve's gauge wars, the Terra/UST collapse — and the book makes promises about returns and stability that have not aged well. Read the structural material and treat all specific numbers and protocol recommendations as historical artifacts.
CoinGecko also has obvious commercial incentives here — the book exists in part to drive engagement with the CoinGecko platform and the projects it lists. The coverage isn't dishonest, but it is uncritical: the systemic risks of DeFi (smart contract risk, oracle risk, governance attacks, the spectacular failures of 2022) are downplayed compared to the upside story. If this is your only DeFi source, you will leave with a more optimistic mental model than the data supports. Pair it with skeptical post-mortems of the 2022 collapses for balance.