DeFi ecosystem still haunted by FTX contagion: Finance Redefined

Welcome to Finance Redefined, your weekly dose of essential decentralized finance (DeFi) insights — a newsletter crafted to bring you significant developments over the last week.

The FTX contagion that started in the second week of November is still haunting various crypto protocols in the DeFi ecosystem. The latest to fall prey to the contagion includes the Solana-based decentralized exchange (DEX) Serum, of which Alameda and FTX were backers. Another DeFi crypto trading firm Auros Global missed its principal repayment on a 2,400 Wrapped Ether (wETH) DeFi loan.

Looking at some other key news in the DeFi ecosystem, popular DEX protocol Uniswap launched its nonfungible token (NFT) marketplace aggregator, allowing users on the platform to trade NFTs.

Ankr became the latest victim of an exploit, with reported losses of nearly $5 million. The decentralized-finance protocol said it is working with exchanges to immediately halt trading of its BNB staking rewards token, aBNBc.

The demand for liquid Ethereum staking has hit new records, seeing the biggest surge post Merge.

The top 100 DeFi tokens saw some relief rally after nearly three weeks of bearish dominance. The majority of the DeFi tokens traded in green, with many hitting double-digit gains.

Serum exchange rendered ‘defunct’ following the collapse of Alameda and FTX

Solana-based DEX Project Serum has notified its community that the collapse of its backers — Alameda and FTX — has rendered it “defunct.” The team behind the project shared that “there is hope” in spite of its ongoing challenges because of the option available to "fork" Serum.

According to the announcement, “A community-wide effort to fork Serum is going strong.” OpenBook, the community-led fork of the Serum v3 program, is already live on Solana with over $1 million daily volume, supported by continuous efforts to expand it and grow its liquidity.

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Crypto trading firm Auros Global misses DeFi payment due to FTX contagion

Crypto trading firm Auros Global appears to be suffering from FTX contagion after missing a principal repayment on a 2,400 wETH DeFi loan.

Institutional credit underwriter M11 Credit, which manages liquidity pools on Maple Finance, told its followers in a Nov. 30 Twitter thread that the Auros had missed a principal payment on the 2,400 wETH loan, which is worth in total around $3 million.

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Ankr confirms exploit, asks for immediate trading halt

BNB Chain-based DeFi protocol Ankr has confirmed it has been hit by a multi-million dollar exploit on Dec. 1. The attack appeared to be first discovered by on-chain security analyst PeckShield at approximately 12:35 am UTC on Dec. 2.

Within an hour of the attack, Ankr confirmed on Twitter that the aBNB token has been exploited and that they’re working with exchanges to immediately halt trading of the compromised token.

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Uniswap launches NFT marketplace aggregator

According to a new post on November 30, DEX Uniswap announced that users can now trade NFTs on its native protocol. As told by Uniswap, the function will initially feature NFT collections for sale on platforms including OpenSea, X2Y2, LooksRare, Sudoswap, Larva Labs, X2Y2, Foundation, NFT20 and NFTX.

Uniswap developers claim that users can save up to 15% on gas costs compared to other NFT aggregators when using Uniswap NFT, which unifies ERC-20 and NFT swapping into a single swap router. Integrated with Permit2, users can swap multiple tokens and NFTs in one swap while saving on gas fees.

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Demand for liquid Ethereum staking options continues to grow post-Merge

Blockchain data analytics carried out by Nansen highlights the ever-growing amount of Ether (ETH) being staked across various staking solutions in the months following Ethereum’s shift to proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus.

The highly anticipated Merge has been a boon for DeFi in general, and staking solutions have been in high demand since Ethereum’s shift to PoS. This is according to blockchain data from a variety of staking solutions across the Ethereum ecosystem.

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DeFi market overview

Analytical data reveals that DeFi’s total value locked rose above $40 billion. Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView show that DeFi’s top 100 tokens by market capitalization had its first bullish week after FTX contagion.

Fantom (FTM) was the biggest gainer among the top 100 DeFi tokens, registering a surge of 36.8% over the past week, followed by Chainlink (LINK) with a 12.47% surge. Uniswap (UNI) also saw weekly gains of 11%.

Thanks for reading our summary of this week’s most impactful DeFi developments. Join us next Friday for more stories, insights and education in this dynamically advancing space.