If you've been following DeFi or Ethereum over the past few months, you've likely heard the term "flash loan" mentioned again and again.

This new DeFi primitive has been at the core of a number of economic exploits and arbitrages.

A thread on the basics of flash loans - 👇

Most DeFi loans take place across days, weeks, or even months.

You can deposit Ethereum into Aave, then withdraw stablecoins for yield farming in Yearn, for instance.

On-chain loans have garnered much traction, with total debt outstanding moving toward $2.5 billion.
While popular, DeFi loans are not capital efficient: to account for custodial risk and volatility risk, you need to put up 130-150% of the value of your loan in collateral.

If your collateral slips below the threshold, you're liquidated, resulting in a fee anywhere from 5-13%.
Flash loans are much different than longer-term DeFi loans.

Flash loans are non-custodial, take place over the course of one block, and require no collateralization.

That's to say, the coins you borrow never appear in your wallet.
When taking a flash loan, you can direct the coins to any protocol and function, as long as you pay back the loan + interest fee within the same transaction.

So what the hell? What are flash loans used for?

More often than not, arbitrage.
This means that if you spot mispriced markets between AMMs or dexs, you can take a flash loan to arbitrage the pools.

Here's a simple example I spotted in the mempool a few months back:

https://t.co/hiBHuTerQH

More on what's happening in the next tweet.
- This user flash borrowed 2,048,000 USDC from dYdX

- Traded that USDC for 2,028,367 DAI in Curve's Y pool

- Traded that DAI for 2,064,182 USDC in Curve's sUSD pool

- Paid dYdX back + 2 wei

All in one block...

Profit: 16,182 USDC
Cost: $60 in gas

Crazy, right?
The transaction I mentioned is just one of many simple arbitrages between different AMMs and diff pools. (More on AMMs in the linked thread.)

There are also advanced arb strategies that enabled the "attacks" on Eminence, Harvest, etc.

Let's take a look.

https://t.co/wftj1YuPtG
Many of these arbs are not AMM based. Instead, these arbs are accomplished by leveraging some faulty or buggy logic in the economic design of a protocol.
Eminence:

- Borrow 15 million DAI from Uniswap
- Mint EMN
- Burn some EMN for eToken, driving up EMN up the curve
- Sell remaining EMN for DAI
- Make millions

The bug was the bonding curve was steep and could be manipulated.

https://t.co/fP3ae4oDXQ
Harvest:

The bug was that Harvest didn't use the get_virtual_price() function from Curve, allowing for manipulation.
Flash loans can also be used for other purposes.

Governance attacks are a good example. They're scary but still kind of sick, to be honest.

On October 26th, a user used flash loans to influence a MakerDAO proposal.

https://t.co/naqLqOi1bS
This user completed multiple complex functions with a single tx, within a single block.

They

- borrowed $20m worth of WETH from dYdX
- deposited it on Aave to borrow $7m worth of MKR
- Locked MKR in governance
- Voted on a proposal
- Unlocked MKR
- Sent MKR, then ETH back
Related to flash loans, developers are working on flash mints for Wrapped Ethereum and DAI. Will do another thread on these later.

Flash loans will be similar in concept to flash mints but will involve the minting, then burning of tokens rapidly to accomplish some feat.
To conclude: Flash loans are an extremely powerful DeFi primitive.

I forgot who said it but they're going to accelerate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to protocols with good economic design.

I'm excited (and scared) to see what flash loans are used for next.

More from Crypto

So the cryptocurrency industry has basically two products, one which is relatively benign and doesn't have product market fit, and one which is malignant and does. The industry has a weird superposition of understanding this fact and (strategically?) not understanding it.


The benign product is sovereign programmable money, which is historically a niche interest of folks with a relatively clustered set of beliefs about the state, the literary merit of Snow Crash, and the utility of gold to the modern economy.

This product has narrow appeal and, accordingly, is worth about as much as everything else on a 486 sitting in someone's basement is worth.

The other product is investment scams, which have approximately the best product market fit of anything produced by humans. In no age, in no country, in no city, at no level of sophistication do people consistently say "Actually I would prefer not to get money for nothing."

This product needs the exchanges like they need oxygen, because the value of it is directly tied to having payment rails to move real currency into the ecosystem and some jurisdictional and regulatory legerdemain to stay one step ahead of the banhammer.

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🌿𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝒔𝒕𝒐𝒓𝒚 𝒐𝒇 𝒂 𝑺𝒕𝒂𝒓 : 𝑫𝒉𝒓𝒖𝒗𝒂 & 𝑽𝒊𝒔𝒉𝒏𝒖

Once upon a time there was a Raja named Uttānapāda born of Svayambhuva Manu,1st man on earth.He had 2 beautiful wives - Suniti & Suruchi & two sons were born of them Dhruva & Uttama respectively.
#talesofkrishna https://t.co/E85MTPkF9W


Now Suniti was the daughter of a tribal chief while Suruchi was the daughter of a rich king. Hence Suruchi was always favored the most by Raja while Suniti was ignored. But while Suniti was gentle & kind hearted by nature Suruchi was venomous inside.
#KrishnaLeela


The story is of a time when ideally the eldest son of the king becomes the heir to the throne. Hence the sinhasan of the Raja belonged to Dhruva.This is why Suruchi who was the 2nd wife nourished poison in her heart for Dhruva as she knew her son will never get the throne.


One day when Dhruva was just 5 years old he went on to sit on his father's lap. Suruchi, the jealous queen, got enraged and shoved him away from Raja as she never wanted Raja to shower Dhruva with his fatherly affection.


Dhruva protested questioning his step mother "why can't i sit on my own father's lap?" A furious Suruchi berated him saying "only God can allow him that privilege. Go ask him"
THREAD: 12 Things Everyone Should Know About IQ

1. IQ is one of the most heritable psychological traits – that is, individual differences in IQ are strongly associated with individual differences in genes (at least in fairly typical modern environments). https://t.co/3XxzW9bxLE


2. The heritability of IQ *increases* from childhood to adulthood. Meanwhile, the effect of the shared environment largely fades away. In other words, when it comes to IQ, nature becomes more important as we get older, nurture less.
https://t.co/UqtS1lpw3n


3. IQ scores have been increasing for the last century or so, a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect. https://t.co/sCZvCst3hw (N ≈ 4 million)

(Note that the Flynn effect shows that IQ isn't 100% genetic; it doesn't show that it's 100% environmental.)


4. IQ predicts many important real world outcomes.

For example, though far from perfect, IQ is the single-best predictor of job performance we have – much better than Emotional Intelligence, the Big Five, Grit, etc. https://t.co/rKUgKDAAVx https://t.co/DWbVI8QSU3


5. Higher IQ is associated with a lower risk of death from most causes, including cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, most forms of cancer, homicide, suicide, and accident. https://t.co/PJjGNyeQRA (N = 728,160)