DeFi and Yield

Construct a simplified balance sheet for a pooled DeFi lending market.

Explain how utilization-based interest-rate models balance borrower demand with withdrawal liquidity.

Calculate a borrower’s loan-to-value ratio, health factor, and liquidation price.

Evaluate collateral parameters using liquidity, volatility, concentration, and oracle quality.

Trace how a liquidation transfers collateral, repays debt, and can create bad debt.

Compare pooled lending and peer-matching lending designs in terms of rates, liquidity, and risk.

Classify stablecoins by collateral type, issuer structure, redemption mechanism, and degree of decentralization.

Trace the minting, redemption, and arbitrage processes that support a stablecoin’s peg.

Evaluate the quality, liquidity, custody, and transparency of a stablecoin’s backing assets.

Calculate a simplified collateralization ratio under normal and stressed asset prices.

Distinguish a temporary secondary-market depeg from protocol insolvency or failed redemption.

Compare fiat-backed, crypto-overcollateralized, and synthetic stablecoins under a shared stress scenario.

Explain how proof-of-stake rewards, penalties, and slashing generate the risk-return profile of staking.

Compare rebasing and exchange-rate-based liquid staking tokens.

Identify the additional dependencies introduced when a liquid staking token is used as DeFi collateral.

Distinguish native staking, liquid staking, and restaking risks.

Decompose a vault’s advertised yield into organic cash flow, leverage, token incentives, and asset-price exposure.

Trace how recursive borrowing amplifies both yield and liquidation risk.

Explain how perpetual futures use funding payments to track an underlying index price.

Calculate profit and loss, margin ratio, and liquidation price for a simple perpetual-futures position.

Compare order-book, virtual-AMM, and liquidity-pool designs for perpetual exchanges.

Identify the oracle, liquidity, and counterparty assumptions in an on-chain derivative.

Distinguish option premiums, insurance premiums, and liquidity-provider returns as forms of risk transfer.

Evaluate whether a derivatives protocol can remain solvent during a rapid market move.

Classify a governance token’s voting, fee, collateral, utility, and cash-flow rights.

Calculate circulating-supply growth and holder dilution from an emission and unlock schedule.

Evaluate whether token incentives create durable activity or short-lived mercenary capital.

Distinguish protocol usage, protocol revenue, token-holder value capture, and token-price appreciation.

Measure governance concentration using voting power, delegation, quorum, and participation data.

Trace a governance proposal from submission to execution and identify possible capture or attack points.

Distinguish raw on-chain records, indexed datasets, protocol-reported figures, and third-party dashboard estimates.

Verify a protocol’s reported total value locked against wallet balances and contract-level data.

Calculate utilization, capital efficiency, fee yield, and revenue yield from protocol metrics.

Separate net user flows from changes caused by token prices, rewards, and internal transfers.

Reconcile conflicting metric values by checking definitions, chains, contracts, and time windows.

Create a comparable metrics table for two protocols operating on different chains.

Identify upgradeability, pause controls, multisignatures, timelocks, and other administrative powers without reading code.

Explain how price-source selection, update frequency, and fallback logic affect oracle robustness.

Classify an incident as an implementation bug, access-control failure, oracle manipulation, governance attack, or economic-design failure.

Interpret the scope, severity, status, and limitations of findings in a smart-contract audit report.

Evaluate the protection offered by audits, formal verification, bug bounties, monitoring, and incident-response plans.

Build a security-risk profile from a protocol’s architecture, deployment history, privileged roles, and unresolved findings.

Compare chains using execution cost, finality, data availability, validator or sequencer control, and operational reliability.

Explain how optimistic and zero-knowledge rollups alter withdrawal, proof, and sequencer risks.

Distinguish canonical bridges, externally verified bridges, liquidity networks, and wrapped-asset issuers.

Map the trust assumptions required to move an asset between two chains.

Evaluate how fragmented liquidity and different chain conditions affect a multichain protocol deployment.

Compare the risk profile of the same protocol when deployed on two different networks.

Construct a dependency graph linking a protocol to its collateral, stablecoins, oracles, bridges, governance, and underlying chains.

Identify hidden leverage created when receipt tokens and borrowed assets are reused across protocols.

Trace a plausible contagion path from one protocol failure to losses elsewhere in DeFi.

Explain how correlated collateral, crowded liquidations, and limited blockspace can worsen market stress.

Design a stress matrix covering price shocks, depegs, oracle failures, liquidity exits, and governance compromise.

Identify which dependencies dominate a protocol’s overall risk despite appearing outside its core contracts.

Define an evaluation question and choose protocol peers that make the comparison meaningful.

Collect primary evidence from documentation, governance forums, audits, explorers, and on-chain dashboards.

Score a protocol’s mechanism, market, financial, governance, security, and dependency risks using explicit criteria.

Write bull, base, and bear cases that distinguish evidence from assumptions.

Compare two protocols and justify which is more resilient for a specified use case.

Design a monitoring checklist of metrics, governance events, contract changes, and risk triggers.

Produce a concise protocol evaluation that states conclusions, uncertainties, and disconfirming evidence.