Yup, I don't understand how a lot of traditional financial instruments work but I still use them. At least these are transparent.

That's one thing that I've really enjoyed so far - a lot of these projects are essentially lego bricks, and I can (and do) try and understand how all of the different pieces fit together. That's something that certainly isn't possible with a lot of traditional finance. Even if I wanted to figure it out, I don't have access to see everything.

Speaking of lego bricks, and I haven't used it yet myself, but https://furucombo.app/ looks really interesting!

I've played around with it a bit. I actually found a juicy arbitrage opportunity, and was trying to use it to chain a few trades together to take advantage. Unfortunately it didn't support one of the trading platforms I needed to use, so I ended up just manually making the transactions separately.

This really drove home how inefficient and full of opportunities Ethereum is if you know where to look.

Learning about flash loans and how they settle in the same transaction that they originated in really made the idea of the lego bricks click for me, it was like a light bulb moment.