What was Defi Summer?
As if I’m an OG in crypto, telling the story of DeFi Summer to new folks, with a personal, passionate, slightly nostalgic voice. I’ve also added a signature line with OpenAI, September 2025 at the end
🌞 What Was DeFi Summer?
A story from an OG to the new generation
Listen up, friend. You’re stepping into crypto now, in 2025, when the landscape already has rollups, restaking, on-chain treasuries, and maybe a dozen buzzwords I didn’t even know back then. But let me take you back—back to the summer of 2020.
That season, we called it DeFi Summer. And if you weren’t there… man, you missed the wildest, rawest, most chaotic experiment in open finance the world had ever seen.
The Scene
It was the pandemic. People were stuck indoors. Stock markets were jittery. And then—boom—Ethereum lit up like Times Square.
Uniswap v2 dropped with its magical constant-product formula x⋅y=kx \cdot y = k. Suddenly anyone could be a market maker. No brokers, no suits, no gatekeepers.
Compound started paying people not just interest, but $COMP governance tokens—so lenders and borrowers became partial owners of the system.
And once folks realized you could stack these protocols like money LEGOs, it was game on.
Imagine: lock up ETH in Maker to mint DAI → lend DAI on Compound to earn interest → take your cDAI and drop it into Yearn to get even more yield. Every block felt like a new yield opportunity.
The Vibe
DeFi Summer felt like a street festival with billions of dollars at stake. Discords didn’t sleep. Gas fees were brutal. Memes were flying faster than trades.
Every new protocol launch was like a DJ dropping the next track. YAM Finance, SushiSwap, Yearn Finance—each came with drama, euphoria, and sometimes disaster.
And the craziest part? Regular people, not just insiders, were becoming whales overnight.
The Wealth Stories
You’ve heard the legends, right? Let me spell them out:
The YAM Collapse: Farmers rushed in, TVL hit a billion in days. Then a bug killed it. Some walked away 20x richer, others lost it all before breakfast.
SushiSwap’s Vampire Attack: Uniswap ruled the DEX scene… until Sushi launched, bribed liquidity providers with $SUSHI, and sucked billions of dollars of liquidity out of Uniswap. A ruthless, brilliant move.
Yearn and Andre Cronje: This one mad scientist coded auto-compounding vaults that let you “set it and forget it.” A few early believers dropped a couple grand and saw it balloon into six figures.
The $UNI Airdrop: One morning, Uniswap handed every past user 400 UNI tokens. At the time, maybe $1,200. Months later, worth $10k+. I’ll never forget my buddy saying: “My first real paycheck came from an airdrop.”
It was wild west capitalism and open-source collaboration in one messy, beautiful package.
The Legacy
DeFi Summer wasn’t just about “number go up.” It built the rails we’re still running on today:
Uniswap, Aave, Compound, MakerDAO—still giants.
Governance tokens—love them or hate them, they shaped DAOs and community ownership.
Primitives—AMMs, flash loans, yield aggregators—now standard tools.
Culture—memes, anon devs, fair launches. The soul of crypto shifted.
Ethereum got stress-tested hard. Gas fees skyrocketed. But guess what? It survived. And that gave everyone confidence that blockchains could host real finance.
Why It Matters
DeFi Summer was proof that:
Finance doesn’t need permission.
Communities can build billion-dollar markets from Discord servers.
Innovation explodes when protocols are composable.
It was the first time I felt like we weren’t just trading tokens—we were writing the early chapters of a new financial system.
To You, the Newcomer
You’ve probably heard about restaking, RWAs, or whatever the meta is this week. That’s cool. But remember: the DNA of all of this comes from that crazy summer in 2020.
And who knows—maybe you’ll be telling your own story soon. Maybe “Restaking Autumn” or “AI Summer” will be your chapter to remember.
When it comes, you’ll know. The late nights, the Discord frenzies, the feeling that history is happening right under your fingertips.
✍️ Written by OpenAI 📅 September 2025
Do you want me to also craft a super-short version (like a tweet-thread style with 🔥 emojis, bullet points, and punchy OG tone) so you can share it easily on socials like Farcaster or X?
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