DeFi
Plain definition. Decentralized finance, or DeFi, means the financial activities and services that are facilitated by cryptocurrency and intended to be conducted without any sort of reliance on traditional financial tools or intermediaries, as the Congressional Research Service described it on March 16, 2026.
Technical definition. In a March 16, 2026 report, the Congressional Research Service defines DeFi as the use of cryptocurrency and certain programs to create a financial system with little, if any, use for intermediaries, relying on public, permissionless and decentralized blockchains, distributed ledgers and smart contracts to group, execute and publish transactions. Smart contracts, pieces of code that self-execute when certain requirements are met, take the place of the intermediary found in traditional finance. In place of credit scores and underwriting standards, DeFi relies on technological tools and collateralization for all transactions.
On this site
On this site, DeFi comes up in Does the XRP Ledger support smart contracts (Hooks, the EVM sidechain), and does that matter for XRP?, Can XRP held with an institutional custodian be put to work in DeFi? and Could Ethereum or Solana become the universal bridge instead of XRP?.
Source
An Overview of Decentralized Finance (Defi) (congress.gov), read October 1, 2026.