DeFi__learning

To become smart contract auditor I need to excel in defi

If your plan is to get into smart contract auditing, then yes understanding DeFi is non-negotiable. Most of the issues auditors uncover aren’t just Solidity mistakes, they’re tied to how protocols handle collateral, liquidity, and incentives.

The way I’d suggest learning:

Learn with practicals: Put a small amount of money in a wallet and use Uniswap, Aave, Compound. Don’t just click buttons, watch what happens. When you add liquidity, where are your tokens going? When you borrow, what exactly is being tracked as collateral? That’s the foundation.

Trace contract flows: Pick one protocol and go through its contracts. For example, With Uniswap v2 you can observe and follow what happens in swap(). With Compound, see how borrow() adjusts balances. You don’t need to read every line, but you should know how the state changes step by step.

Understand how things break: DeFi exploits usually come from design gaps, not typos. Reentrancy, oracle manipulation, flash loan tricks. These are patterns you’ll see again and again. When you study a protocol, ask yourself: what assumption could an attacker abuse here?

Learn from real audits: Look at reports from OpenZeppelin, Trail of Bits, ConsenSys. Don’t just skim. Pick one finding and try to reproduce it in a small test contract. That exercise will sharpen your instincts faster than theory ever will.

Think in systems: When you audit, you’re not just checking one contract in isolation. You need to see how it interacts with price oracles, governance, and even external protocols. That’s why DeFi knowledge matters. The weak spots often live in those connections.

If you stick to this loop use → read → break → repeat. You’ll gradually build the intuition that separates good auditors from average developers.