By the end you will have followed one stack of money through four machines you know by name, seen what each floor earns and what it promises, and picked up the habit insiders never explain: counting floors wherever money sits.
Somewhere on your feed this week, a protocol promised staking yield plus lending yield plus trading fees, all in one token. You scrolled past it, or you did not. Either way, you could not check its math. After this lesson, you can.
You now know every machine on Act 2's floor. This finale snaps them together: one stack of real money through four machines, and the habit insiders never explain. Counting floors.
The Web3 course made a claim once, in one line: DeFi's machines plug into machines, permissionlessly, tonight. Function first: any machine's output can be another machine's input, because they share one chain and ask nobody's permission. The names: composability, or the affectionate one, money legos.
Time to test the claim with only parts you already own. Picture a tower where every machine is a floor built on the one below. Every floor collects rent. And every floor's tenants inherit the landlord problems of all the floors underneath. We start at the ground: one ETH.
Build floor 1. Stake the ETH through Lido and hold the receipt: stETH, the deposit slip that became money, from Liquid Staking and Restaking. The floor earns the base rate, paid by the network for its own security. First income.
First promise added, too. Your ETH is now someone's paper: the receipt is only as good as its issuer. One floor up, one rent collected, one landlord problem inherited. Every floor will do both.
Build floor 2. Walk the receipt to the pawnshop counter from Lending Markets: stETH as collateral on Aave. The counter pays a thin line of deposit interest, and it unlocks the real move: borrowing USDC against the receipt.
This floor is heavy with promises. The bounty hunters from Liquidations now watch your loan's health. The rate thermostat can spike your borrow cost overnight, and nobody decides it: the curve does. And the loan's meter runs whether the floor above pays or not.
Build floor 3. The borrowed USDC goes to work as a booth from Being the House: an LP position in a stable pool. It earns swap fees, paid by traders, while the staking yield keeps ticking two floors below.
Promise added: the booth's own ledger, fees against the gap. And a quieter one: this floor stands on a loan. If the loan below turns unhealthy, floor 3's furniture gets sold to save it. Tenants inherit the landlord problems underneath.
Step back. One ETH has passed through four machines you know by name, in one evening, through public doors, with nobody's permission. The claim from the Web3 course was true. Now read what it actually built: tap each floor for its rent and its promise.