DeFi Glossary

A few key terms for those new to the language

General terms

DeFi

DeFi is short for Decentralized Finance, which is used to broadly refer to software to invest and trade cryptocurrencies. There's a nice overview of DeFi here.

Smart contract

A smart contract is software that lives on the blockchain. More info on this here.

Smart contract audits

A process where an independent third party inspects and tests smart contracts. Auditors look for vulnerabilities that a hacker could exploit to steal funds or otherwise compromise the system. Audits help keep users' funds safe, and the founders of Revo are moving quickly to get our contracts audited as soon as possible.

More info about smart contract audits here.

Token

Another word for a cryptocurrency, but more general-- tokens can be used for governance, can be non-fungible or unique, and can even be non-exchangeable.

Liquidity

Liquidity is the ability to buy or sell an asset. The more liquidity an asset has, the easier it is to acquire or trade for something else at a fair price. More here.

ERC-20

A standard interface for tokens on EVM-compatible blockchains. ERC-20 tokens generally behave as you would expect a cryptocurrency to behave-- they are "fungible", meaning they are indistinguishable from one another, they can be transferred between parties, burned, minted, and spent on another's behalf (if they gave permission).

Note: NFTs are not ERC-20 tokens. Generally they implement a different interface known as ERC-721.

More on ERC-20 here.

Staking

At a high level, staking means depositing one or more cryptocurrencies in a smart contract to gain rewards. For yield farming, there are at least two use cases for staking:

• depositing two tokens in a liquidity pool

• depositing two LP tokens into a yield farm

More info here.

Decentralized Governance

Decentralized governance is where key decisions about how a platform should work-- such as what features are added, or new use of community funds-- are voted on by stakeholders (rather than decided on unilaterally by some centralized unit, like a founder). Typically voting involves staking governance tokens.

Celo and Ethereum both use decentralized governance for making changes to their blockchains, and Mobius (a DEX) uses it to manage changes to their platform.

Decentralized Exchanges (DEX)

Decentralized Exchanges are platform allowing people to trade different cryptocurrencies for each other using liquidity pools. Popular examples are Uniswap and Sushiswap. Ubeswap is a Celo-native DEX and a fork of Sushiswap. More info here.

Slippage

Slippage is the difference in the expected output of a swap in a DEX and the actual output due to market movement after you preview your swap, but before it executes. Slippage can negatively impact the output of a swap. Revo will revert a swap (i.e., prevent it from ever occuring) if it detects slippage higher than 5%.

Price Impact

Price impact is the difference in market price and the actual price of a swap in a DEX due to trade size. In general, the higher the liquidity a token has, the lower the price impact for trading that token. More info here.

Liquidity pool

A liquidity pool is a smart contract that enables people to swap between two different tokens in exchange for a small fee. Using a DEX, anyone can stake two tokens that they own in a liquidity pool to help others buy or sell one of them in exchange for a share of the swap fees. An article on this here.

LP tokens

LP tokens represent a share in a liquidity pool. When you stake tokens in a liquidity pool, you get LP tokens in exchange. You can later trade your LP token back for tokens in the liquidity pool, plus your share of the swap fees which have taken place since you first acquired the LP.

Yield farm

A yield farm is a smart contract which you can deposit LP tokens in to get extra rewards (in addition to the swap fees one normally receives for staking tokens in a liquidity pool).

Liquidity is generally a good thing for DEX's and blockchains, so organizations like Ubeswap and Celo sometimes deploy a yield farm to incentivize people to invest in a token and stake it in a liquidity pool to improve the liquidity of that token.

Revo specific terms

Farm Bot

Farm Bots are Revo smart contracts which offer compound interest on yield farming. Farm Bots automate the process of re-investing yield farming rewards back into the farm, so that users can earn compound interest without any manual effort.

RFP Tokens

RFP (short for "Revo Farm Point") tokens represent shares in a Farm Bot. RFP Tokens are backed by LP tokens, meaning they can be bought for LP tokens or sold for LP tokens at any given time. RFP Tokens can be thought of as interest-bearing wrappers for LP tokens, because the rewards gained by investing LP tokens in a yield farm are re-invested in the farm, so the value of RFP tokens will increase over time.

Zap In

Zapping in to a Farm Bot means trading a non-Revo token (like cUSD, CELO, or UBE) for an FP token. Under the hood, zapping in works like any other token swap in a DEX, making use of liquidity pools.

Zapping out works the same way, but in the reverse direction (swapping an FP token for a non-Revo token).