DeFi Lessons Learned: Advice From Those Who’ve Been There

I’d tell my past self to never be blinded by high yields and to always ask who controls the smart contract. Security and transparency are more important than flashy returns. In DeFi, protecting your principal is the single most important priority.

If I could pull my past self aside before diving into DeFi, I’d say this: slow down, don’t get blinded by the upside, and treat everything as “guilty until proven innocent.” Early on, it’s easy to get swept up in APYs that look like lottery tickets, or projects with slick whitepapers and Discord hype. The reality is, most of those aren’t built to last. I learned (the hard way) that smart contracts can be exploited, liquidity can vanish overnight, and anonymous founders can disappear just as quickly as they showed up.

The most important thing to prioritize is risk management over returns. That means auditing where your money goes, spreading exposure instead of going all-in, and only interacting with protocols that have strong security practices and community trust. Today, I’d tell myself: focus on understanding the fundamentals of how a protocol works, where the yield comes from, how governance operates, and whether there’s transparency in the team’s decisions. In DeFi, survival matters more than chasing the flashiest returns. Protect your capital first, and the opportunities will still be there tomorrow.

If I could give any advice to my past self before jumping into DeFi, it would be this: don’t get caught up in hype cycles. The space moves fast, one week a new yield strategy is taking over, the next week there’s a new token launch. The thing is, most of that doesn’t stick around. Instead, what lasts are the projects that are laser focused on fundamentals, security, trust, and infrastructure.

That’s the trend I’ve seen with Kava. They haven’t chased every trend, instead they’ve focused on building blocks like Kava Lend, a cross-chain lending platform with Chainlink oracles built in and native USDT support. Moves like that might not always make the headlines, but they’re the kind of infrastructure that can weather market cycles and just keep on chugging.

So the most important thing to keep your eye on isn’t really trying to time the market. It’s building with resilience and fundamentals in mind. If you can do that, you’re not going to get shaken out by the dips.

Based on what you know now, what would you tell your past self as they entered the world of DeFi? What needs to come first?

If I had to do it all over again, I would warn myself to take the same level of discipline I apply to scale a business and not to take anything for granted in DeFi as well: treat everything as a discrete franchise and not a levered up long. It’s so tempting to chase yield, or dive headfirst into whatever is the new protocol of the moment, but the risks — from lack of liquidity to vulnerabilities in smart contracts — make it imperative to place security and risk management ahead of returns. In reality, this read involves more research on who has sponsored the project, which audits are already completed, and how much the team can be credited for governance being made transparent.

The priority should be the preservation of capital. DeFi is riskier, and while gains are sometimes spectacular, losses can be as well. You may be able to keep your head down and just learn rather than chase if you cast your participation as an experiment and bet only what you can truly afford. A lack of safety nets makes that growth unsustainable, as in business. This way, you avoid the unrealistic exposure trap, and instead build up resistance, thus finally allowing you to capture potential when in the end it extrapolates to something far more durable.