# Introduction to Buttonwood

**What is Buttonwood?**

Buttonwood is a collection of DeFi primitives for building powerful decentralized financial instruments. One of Buttonwood's insights is that everything in finance is some form of a tranche. The ButtonTranche contracts serve as a foundation for marketplaces such as liquidation-free debt, convertible bonds, and options, and assets like fiat-free stablecoins.

The Buttonwood Foundation was formed on the thesis that in order to build the future of finance (DeFi) we have to recognize learnings from the past and start from first principles. Besides AMMs (Uniswap), and margin lending (Aave), DeFi is still missing large parts of the financial stack.

Buttonwood’s permissionless core contracts were designed to be easily composable — developers need only to build routers and a UI.<br>

Apps: [button.finance](https://www.button.finance)&#x20;


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