Learning path: beginner to expert

This page orders all 62 topic pages into a single reading path. Every line links twice: first to that page’s “Explain it simply” section (§2 — the analogy, ELI5 and walkthrough), second to its “Reference doc” section (§9 — the primary source the page is built on). Read §2 first; come back for §9 once the mechanism makes sense. The “why now” clause says why the page belongs at that point in the sequence rather than earlier or later.

The path follows one rule: nothing is assumed except what an earlier stage already covered. Ethereum and Solana pages are interleaved throughout — this is not “learn Ethereum, then learn Solana,” because almost every mechanism only makes sense in contrast with its counterpart on the other chain.

Stage 1 — Foundations (5 pages)

Before any protocol makes sense, you need the substrate it runs on: how state is stored, how blockspace is priced, and who decides transaction order.

1. Accounts and execution models (reference) — why now: every later page assumes you know whether a chain executes sequentially (Ethereum) or in parallel over declared accounts (Solana).
2. Token standards (reference) — why now: “what is a token” has a different answer on each chain, and that answer shapes every DeFi primitive that moves one.
3. Fee markets (reference) — why now: base fees, priority fees and compute units decide who gets included and at what cost, a constraint every mechanism design page runs into.
4. MEV supply chain (reference) — why now: knowing who orders a block (searcher → builder → relay → proposer, or leader + Jito) is a prerequisite for every AMM, lending and MEV page that follows.
5. Roadmaps (reference) — why now: gives the destination each chain is building toward (rollup-centric vs. single-chain scaling), so later pages about unfinished proposals have a map to place them on.

Stage 2 — Core primitives (12 pages)

The load-bearing mechanisms of DeFi: the AMM, the money market, the stablecoin, the price oracle, and staking. Everything downstream is a variation on one of these five.

6. Pooled money markets (reference) — why now: the simplest lending primitive, and the one every later lending page modifies.
7. CFMM math: x·y=k (reference) — why now: the constant-product formula is the one piece of math nearly every exchange page assumes you already have.
8. Impermanent loss vs. LVR (reference) — why now: the direct cost of running the pool from page 7 — you can’t judge any AMM design later without this baseline.
9. Concentrated liquidity (reference) — why now: the single most consequential AMM upgrade (Uniswap v3, Orca, Raydium, Meteora) and a prerequisite for the v4/am-AMM and stable-pool pages later.
10. Collateral, LTV, and health factor (reference) — why now: the safety math behind every borrow, needed before liquidations make sense.
11. Liquidations (reference) — why now: what happens when page 10’s health factor breaks — the mechanism behind most of the incident database.
12. Fiat-backed stablecoins and CCTP (reference) — why now: over 80% of stablecoin supply, and the simplest peg mechanism (redemption arbitrage) before the CDP and algorithmic variants.
13. CDP-backed stablecoins (reference) — why now: combines page 7-11’s AMM and lending mechanics into a third primitive: a stablecoin backed by on-chain collateral instead of off-chain cash.
14. Push, pull, and on-chain TWAP oracles (reference) — why now: every price used in pages 6-13 came from somewhere; this is where.
15. Oracle manipulation (reference) — why now: shows exactly how a wrong price (page 14) turns into a real loss (bZx, Harvest, Mango, Venus) — essential before the risk-focused pages later.
16. Issuance and staking economics (reference) — why now: the fifth primitive — how each chain pays for security — independent of the AMM/lending/stablecoin stack above.
17. Liquid staking tokens (reference) — why now: the receipt-token pattern from staking, needed before restaking and LRTs make sense later.

Stage 3 — Mechanism design deep dives (18 pages)

With the five primitives in hand, this stage is where each one gets specialized: better AMM curves, fixed-vs-floating rates, execution without a public mempool, and stablecoins that don’t rely on a bank account.

18. Stable pools: Curve StableSwap, Curve v2, Orbital (reference) — why now: the AMM curve purpose-built for assets that should trade near 1:1, directly relevant to the stablecoins you just met.
19. TWAMM (reference) — why now: the first of the “solve one AMM weakness” research pages — here, executing a large order without moving the price.
20. Batch auctions and uniform clearing prices (reference) — why now: a structurally different answer to ordering-based MEV than anything in Stage 1-2.
21. On-chain order books (reference) — why now: the alternative to a curve entirely — needed before comparing perp venues in Stage 4.
22. Routing and aggregation (reference) — why now: how a trade actually finds the best price across every pool and book you’ve now met.
23. RFQ and intents (reference) — why now: moves price discovery off-chain entirely, the execution model behind most retail swaps today.
24. Uniswap v4 hooks and the am-AMM (reference) — why now: turns the AMM into a programmable platform, the frontier of Ethereum-side LP-value-capture research.
25. AMM price oracles (reference) — why now: closes the loop between Stage 2’s oracle pages and the AMMs you now understand in depth.
26. Order flow toxicity and JIT liquidity (reference) — why now: quantifies exactly which trades hurt an LP, tying together concentrated liquidity, LVR and routing.
27. Bonding curves and token launches (reference) — why now: a different problem for a CFMM to solve — pricing an asset before any market exists.
28. Interest rate models (reference) — why now: how the rate in Stage 2’s money markets is actually set, and how fixed rates get discovered instead.
29. Modular lending (reference) — why now: Morpho Blue, Euler v2 and Kamino’s response to money-market risk — isolate the market instead of pooling it.
30. Flash loans (reference) — why now: the single most common tool in the incident database you’ll read in Stage 5 — understand the mechanism before the exploits.
31. Risk engines (reference) — why now: the code path that checks every borrow in real time, and why a mathematically correct formula can still take a manipulated input.
32. Delta-neutral stablecoins — Ethena’s USDe (reference) — why now: a third stablecoin design — hedged with derivatives instead of held in cash or code.
33. Algorithmic stablecoins and why they broke (reference) — why now: the fourth design, and the one with the largest historical failure (Terra/LUNA) — best understood after seeing three designs that mostly worked.
34. How pegs hold — arbitrage, PSMs, and de-pegs (reference) — why now: unifies all four stablecoin designs under one arbitrage argument, and explains why pegs break.
35. Stablecoins as payment rails (reference) — why now: what stablecoins are actually used for outside DeFi trading, including Tempo and Solana Pay.

Stage 4 — Derivatives and advanced markets (10 pages)

Once spot trading, lending and stablecoins are solid, derivatives recombine them into leverage, fixed income, options, and belief markets.

36. Perpetual futures (reference) — why now: the dominant DeFi derivative, and the one every later derivatives page either extends or reframes.
37. Power perpetuals and everlasting options (reference) — why now: applies the funding-payment trick from page 36 to options and to index$^p$ exposure.
38. On-chain options (reference) — why now: the instrument power perpetuals and everlasting options are built in reference to.
39. Yield tokenization — Pendle’s PT/YT split (reference) — why now: fixed income built on top of Stage 2-3’s variable-rate lending and staking yield.
40. Prediction markets (reference) — why now: a derivative on real-world events rather than an asset price, and the venue-design question (order book vs. AMM) it raises.
41. Prediction market AMMs — LMSR, pm-AMM (reference) — why now: answers the AMM half of page 40’s question, and needs Stage 3’s AMM-design vocabulary to follow.
42. The limits of private AMMs with ZK proofs (reference) — why now: a hard impossibility result about the AMMs you now know well — best appreciated once the mechanism is second nature.
43. Restaking (reference) — why now: takes Stage 2’s liquid staking token and puts it to work securing a second service.
44. The risks of liquid restaking tokens (reference) — why now: what can go wrong when restaking (page 43) is wrapped in a tradeable token — the ezETH depeg is the case study.
45. Oracle-free designs — Blend (reference) — why now: revisits Stage 2’s oracle-manipulation problem and asks whether lending can work without an oracle at all.

Stage 5 — MEV, cross-chain, and security (14 pages)

This stage is the systemic-risk layer: who profits from transaction ordering, how value crosses between chains, and the recurring bug classes behind DeFi’s biggest losses.

46. MEV taxonomy (reference) — why now: names the strategies (arb, sandwich, liquidation, backrun) that Stage 1’s MEV supply chain page only sketched.
47. PBS and ePBS (reference) — why now: how Ethereum tries to let ordinary validators earn MEV without running trading infrastructure — and where that trust model failed in 2023.
48. MEV burn, execution tickets, FOCIL, timing games (reference) — why now: the unshipped protocol-level fixes for the auction dynamics page 47 exposes.
49. Order flow auctions (reference) — why now: the production answer that shipped while page 48’s proposals are still research — refund the user instead of eliminating the auction.
50. Encrypted mempools (reference) — why now: a structurally different fix — hide the transaction instead of taxing or auctioning its position.
51. Solana MEV (reference) — why now: everything in pages 46-50 reconsidered for a chain with no public mempool at all.
52. Based rollups and preconfirmations (reference) — why now: connects MEV and ordering to Ethereum’s rollup roadmap from Stage 1.
53. Bridge designs (reference) — why now: the trust-model taxonomy every cross-chain page and half the incident database assumes.
54. Cross-chain intents and solvers (reference) — why now: applies Stage 3’s intents idea (page 23) across chains instead of within one.
55. Cross-L2 interoperability (reference) — why now: the unsolved frontier of making Ethereum’s rollups feel like one chain.
56. Bridge hacks (reference) — why now: what happens when page 53’s trust models fail — read after the designs, not before.
57. Bug classes in smart contracts and Solana programs (reference) — why now: the recurring vulnerability patterns behind most of the incident database, named precisely.
58. Security incident timeline (reference) — why now: the sourced 2016-2026 ledger that this site’s own incident database builds on.
59. Trusted hardware and threat models (reference) — why now: closes the security arc by showing the biggest losses came from social engineering and admin keys, not broken cryptography.

Stage 6 — Systemic, policy, and frontier topics (3 pages)

The last three pages step back from any one mechanism to ask how DeFi governs itself, how it meets traditional finance, and where privacy fits into a transparent ledger.

60. Governance and tokenomics (reference) — why now: needs Stage 5’s Beanstalk and Compound governance-attack case studies to land, and closes the loop on every protocol you’ve now studied.
61. TradFi convergence and real-world assets (reference) — why now: where the stablecoin and lending primitives from Stages 2-3 meet institutional finance.
62. Privacy and compliance in DeFi (reference) — why now: the last open question — everything on this site has been built on a public ledger, and this page is where that stops being free.

If you only have an hour, a day, or a week

Budget	Pages (in order)	What you’ll walk away with
One hour	Accounts and execution → CFMM math → Pooled money markets → MEV taxonomy	The four ideas everything else on this site assumes: how state and execution differ across chains, how an AMM prices a trade, how over-collateralized lending works, and why block order is worth money.
One day	Stage 1 (5 pages) + CFMM math, Impermanent loss vs. LVR, Collateral, LTV, and health factor, Liquidations, Fiat-backed stablecoins and CCTP, Push/pull/TWAP oracles, Perpetual futures, Bridge designs, Security incident timeline (14 pages)	A working model of accounts, fees, MEV, AMMs, lending, stablecoins, oracles, perps, bridges, and where the money has actually been lost.
One week	All of Stage 1 and Stage 2, plus Roadmaps, Stable pools, Modular lending, Delta-neutral stablecoins, Algorithmic stablecoins, Restaking, LRT risks, PBS and ePBS, Solana MEV, Bridge hacks, Oracle manipulation, Bug classes, Governance and tokenomics, TradFi convergence and RWAs, Privacy and compliance (~29 pages)	Roughly half the site — enough to read the Ethereum vs Solana comparison, the incident database and the timeline with full context, and to know exactly which Stage 3-5 deep dive to reach for next.

For the full 62-page sequence, work Stage 1 through Stage 6 in order — each stage is written assuming only the stages before it.