It's not bad, but it could be a lot better. First of all, it's slightly dated, because Prof Harvey talks about 2022 being the future. But what is more of a letdown is how he speaks at a high level of abstraction and doesn't work in real world examples of what he's talking about. I think this is a common failure of people who teach tech. I recall back in the pre-Internet 1980s people were chatting about how great it would be when computers could "talk to each other." I asked why. Because then you can access databases, they said. What's a database, I asked. Well, they said, it's like the phone book. I answered, but I already have a phone book. I was coming at it from a point of complete innocence. I may well have been a farmer in 1850 and they might have been describing the internal combustion engine. If they could have simplified it into a real world scenario, it might have come to life. "When computers can talk to each other, you can call up the computer at the Barnstable Registry of Deeds (on Cape Cod, 88 miles from my house and a 2-hour drive one way). Every document they have will be digitized, so you can run a title exam for a piece of real estate from your desktop computer, eliminating a long drive." Oh. As I said, it wasn't bad, but I'm left with lots of new abstract concepts swimming around in my head. Harvey should have led me to firm ground.

Very basic introduction. Could have been better with some illustrations. Lots of slides with lots of bullets that author voices over- fortunately its not just read out as is. Lots of "DeFi this, DeFi that, you can combine tokens to create new tokes, you can fork away" without explaining any of that. No sound theory so far, feels more like a hyped DeFi worshop posing to give some balanced angle. No math, no code, no software, no details on protocols. Not bad for getting a quick overview of buzz words, but thats it. Planning to try the next one in the series. Hoping that would be better.

This course is focused on trying to justify the use case of criptocurrencies and DeFI, instead of explaining the concepts of DeFi infrastructure. Too much effort is put into convincing the student that DeFi is better than CeFi. Rougly half of the time is spent trying to justify the doubtful benefits of DeFi compared to CeFi, so the teaching pace is very slow and the DeFi concepts are barely skimmed and always mixed with biased opinions about the conveniency of DeFi against CeFi.

From the beginning I have had the impression that the professor wanted to 'sell' the idea that DeFi only has advantages, that it is the best option deal with transactions and so on, accurately forgetting or minimizing the seversl drawbacks. Many of the topics covered were not explained clearly but only slightly mentioned, moreover his pronunciation of the word 'finance' was hard to tolerate throughout the course.

Not worth it. This is an opinion piece with basic terms and NOT an academic overview of DeFi.

I appreciate the high-quality content and the instructor’s strong qualifications for the Decentralized Finance (DeFi) Infrastructure course. The material is clearly well-researched and insightful. However, I found the pacing of the lectures to be quite slow—so much so that I had to increase the playback speed to 1.75x just to maintain engagement. It felt as if the delivery was more focused on style and presentation rather than efficient communication of the concepts. At times, the instructor’s tone and pacing came across as deliberately slow, almost like a performance intended to highlight his own voice, which made it difficult to stay focused. While I respect the instructor’s expertise, I believe a more natural and engaging delivery style with a more balanced pace would significantly enhance the learning experience. Thank you for your efforts in creating this course and for considering feedback from learners.

Very poor quality course. The lecturer doesnt know hsi subject and was expremely poor. Didnt expect this from a Duke prof.

I did not understand much.