I don’t get it, could someone who understands explain how this worked out? Like, wasn’t it on some kind of blockchain? like did they send their stake to the “ether”? (buh dum tiss)

This isn’t making obvious sense to me based on how very little I have paid attention to what these defi platforms actually do.. aren’t the coins and exchanges just nodes and a P2P distributed database with consensus driven transaction records, asymmetric encryption, metadata and some rules?