1inch releases reDeFine Money, a book on the DeFi revolution

DeFi is still young, but it has already seen enough drama, comedy and tragedy. reDeFine Money tells that story in the words of the founders and builders who created it.

What comes to your mind when you hear “DeFi”? Bubbles, hacks, forks, collapses, reinventions and moments of genuine breakthrough?

Want to make sense of how this industry was built - and why it survived when many centralized crypto institutions failed?

That is the idea behind reDeFine Money, a new book produced by 1inch and focused on the DeFi industry as a whole, not on a single project or person.

A first-person history of DeFi

reDeFine Money is a first-person oral history of the decentralized finance revolution, told by the people who built it.

The book features founders and builders from Aave, Curve, 1inch, MakerDAO, PancakeSwap, SushiSwap, Dragonfly, Dune and other major DeFi teams.

Among the interviewees are Sergej Kunz and Anton Bukov, co-founders of 1inch; Stani Kulechov, founder of Aave; Michael Egorov, founder and CEO of Curve; Rune Christensen, co-founder of MakerDAO; Fredrik Haga, co-founder of Dune; Kain Warwick, founder of Synthetix and co-founder of Infinex; and Eowyn Chen, ex-CEO of Trust Wallet.

Rather than a technical manual, the book reads as a collective memoir. It follows how a group of idealists, hackers and outcasts built a parallel financial system from scratch - and how that system kept working through crises that would have killed many traditional institutions.

DeFi as infrastructure

The central argument of reDeFine Money is simple: DeFi is not just a product, a trend or a speculative asset class. It is infrastructure.

The book looks at how DeFi created on-chain versions of exchanges, lending markets, stablecoins and trading infrastructure outside the traditional financial system.

A central argument in the book is that the 2022 crash did not break DeFi - and that in many ways, it demonstrated the resilience of transparent, on-chain infrastructure compared to centralized intermediaries.

Interviewees in the book reflect on how the failures of Three Arrows Capital, Celsius and FTX highlighted the risks of centralized intermediaries, and how on-chain protocols continued to operate through the same period.

Why 1inch produced the book

Producing a book is not a core product task for 1inch. But it fits a larger mission.

As DeFi moves closer to mainstream adoption, users need more than interfaces and protocols. They also need context. They need to understand where DeFi came from, what problems it tries to solve and why its design principles matter.

With reDeFine Money, 1inch aims to support DeFi education and help more users understand the industry’s history, failures and breakthroughs.

The project also reflects 1inch’s role as a thought leader in DeFi. 1inch was one of the teams that helped shape decentralized trading, and this book gives the wider industry a way to document its own story before that story is rewritten from the outside.

The story behind the next financial system

reDeFine Money explores several themes that now define DeFi’s direction:

• DeFi as financial infrastructure.
• The failure of centralized intermediaries.
• Permissionless innovation.
• Self-custody and financial ownership.
• Building a parallel financial system on decentralized rails.

These themes are not abstract. They come through in the personal stories of people who built protocols, survived market crashes and kept working through periods when much of the outside world dismissed DeFi as a temporary experiment.

The result is not a book about nostalgia. It is a book about what comes next.

The founders and builders featured in reDeFine Money largely point to the same future: not DeFi vs. TradFi, but a gradual rewriting of global finance on decentralized rails.

How to get the book

Physical copies of reDeFine Money will be distributed at events where 1inch is participating.

To receive a free PDF version, sign up here. PDF versions will be distributed later this summer. We will announce it through 1inch social media channels.

Follow 1inch to get updates and learn when you can receive your copy of reDeFine Money.