Welcome to Finance Redefined, your weekly dose of essential decentralized finance (DeFi) insights, a newsletter crafted to bring you the biggest happenings of the past week.
The FTX contagion, which began in the second week of November, continues to affect various crypto protocols in the DeFi ecosystem. The latest to fall prey to the contagion includes Solana-based decentralized exchange (DEX) Serum, which Alameda and FTX were sponsors of. Another DeFi cryptocurrency trading company, Auros Global, failed to pay principal on a 2,400 Wrapped Ether (wETH) DeFi loan.
As for other key news in the DeFi ecosystem, popular DEX protocol Uniswap has launched its non-fungible token (NFT) market aggregator, allowing users of 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 reward token, aBNBc.
Demand for Ethereum liquid staking has reached new records, experiencing the largest increase after the merger.
The top 100 DeFi tokens saw a relief rally after nearly three weeks of bearish dominance. Most DeFi tokens traded in the green, with many achieving double-digit gains.
Serum exchange becomes “defunct” after Alameda and FTX collapse
The Solana-based DEX Serum project has notified its community that the collapse of its sponsors – Alameda and FTX – has rendered it “defunct”. The team behind the project shared that “there is hope” despite their continued challenges due to the available option to “fork” Serum.
According to the announcement, “a community-wide effort to fork Serum is going from strength to strength.” OpenBook, the community-led fork of the Serum v3 program, is now live on Solana with daily volume in excess of $1 million, supported by continued efforts to scale it up and grow its liquidity.
Continue reading
Crypto Trading Firm Auros Global Loses DeFi Payment Due to FTX Contagion
Crypto trading firm Auros Global appears to be suffering from FTX contagion after missing the principal payment on a 2,400 wETH DeFi loan.
Institutional credit underwriter M11 Credit, which manages liquidity pools at Maple Finance, told followers in a November 30 Twitter thread that the Auros had failed to repay principal on the 2,400 wETH loan, which has a total value of of around USD 3 million.
Continue reading
Ankr confirms the exploit and calls for the immediate suspension of operations
BNB Chain-based DeFi protocol Ankr has confirmed that it has been hit by a multi-billion dollar exploit on December 1st. The attack appeared to be first discovered by on-chain security analyst PeckShield at approximately 12:35 am UTC on December 2.
Within an hour of the attack, Ankr confirmed on Twitter that the aBNB token had been exploited and that they were working with exchanges to immediately stop trading in the compromised token.
Continue reading
Uniswap Launches NFT Market Aggregator
According to a new post on November 30, DEX Uniswap announced that users can now trade NFTs on their native protocol. As reported by Uniswap, the feature will initially feature NFT collections for sale on platforms such as 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 they use Uniswap NFT, which unifies ERC-20 and NFT swaps into a single swap router. Integrated with Permit2, users can trade multiple tokens and NFTs in a single swap while saving on gas costs.
Continue reading
Demand for liquid Ethereum staking options continues to grow after the merger
On-chain block data analysis by Nansen highlights the increasing amount of Ether (ETH) that has been staked via various parking solutions in the months since Ethereum’s switch to proof-of-consensus of-stake (PoS).
The long-awaited merger has been a boon to the DeFi sector in general, and staking solutions have been in high demand since Ethereum’s switch to PoS. This is based on blockchain data from a variety of staking solutions across the Ethereum ecosystem.
Continue reading
DeFi Market Overview
Analytical data reveals that the total value locked in DeFi exceeded $40 billion. Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView shows that the top 100 DeFi tokens by market cap had their first bullish week after the FTX contagion.
Fantom (FTM) gained the most among the top 100 DeFi tokens, posting a 36.8% rise over the past week, followed by Chainlink (LINK) with a 12.47% rise. Uniswap (UNI) also posted weekly gains of 11%.
Thanks for reading our roundup of this week’s biggest DeFi events. Join us next Friday for more stories, perspectives, and education in this dynamically advancing space.
Investments in crypto assets are not regulated. They may not be suitable for retail investors and the entire amount invested may be lost. The services or products offered are not directed or accessible to investors in Spain.