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 …

Following yesterday's confirmed multi-million dollar exploit, BNB Chain based protocol Ankr took to its company blog on Dec. 2 to relay its next steps to users. The team said it was identifying liquidity providers to decentralized exchanges as well as protocols supporting aBNBc or aBNBb LP. The group also said it is assessing aBNBc collateral pools, such as Midas and Helio. According to the post, Ankr intends to purchase $5 million worth of BNB, which it will use to compensate liquidity providers affected by the exploit. However, the company said it only intends to compensate LPs who were "caught off …

The downfall of FTX and a number of other CeFi platforms in 2022 has reinforced a Bitcoin maximalist narrative, according to which most of the crypto ecosystem will eventually collapse due to its centralization. Jeff Booth, Bitcoin proponent and author of "The Price of Tomorrow", believes centralized crypto platforms such as FTX and Celsius have ended up replicating the traditional financial system with all its inherent flaws. "All of crypto is trying to rebuild a financial system that we already have based on manipulation and centralization," said Booth, in an exclusive interview with Cointelegraph. Even Defi platforms, which seek to …

As the BNB Chain-based protocol Ankr was exploited and the hacker dumped Ankr Reward Bearing Staked BNB (aBNBc) tokens, a trader took advantage of the price discrepancies to turn $2,879 into $15.5 million. As previously reported by Cointelegraph, security firm Beosin suggested that the multi-million dollar exploit may have come from vulnerabilities in the smart contract code and compromised private keys due to a technical upgrade. Then, the hacker minted and dumped 20 trillion aBNBc tokens, significantly lowering the price of aBNBc. As this happened, a trader reacted quickly and took advantage of an opportunity. Going through on-chain data, analysis …

The BNB Chain-based decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Ankr has confirmed it has been hit by a multi-million dollar exploit on Dec. 1. The attacker was purportedly able to mint 20 trillion Ankr Reward Bearing Staked BNB (aBNBc), a reward-bearing token for BNB (BNB) staked on the protocol. The exploiter has since used services such as Uniswap, Tornado Cash, and various bridges to swap and obfuscate the funds and has successfully gained around 5 million USD Coin (USDC) Seems that @ankr got hacked an hour ago! The exploiter minted 20T aBNBc and dumped it on #PancakeSwap. At present, the exploiter have …

Decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Trader Joe has announced its very first expansion from Avalanche and onto the Ethereum ecosystem, as part of its plans to access new markets and drive up user activity. The decentralized trading platform announced its “multi-chain” expansion into Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution Arbitrum One on Dec. 1 and follows around a month after it stated its intention to expand to additional markets and ink new partnerships amid falling TVL and user activity in the third quarter. We're extremely excited to announce that @traderjoe_xyz has expanded into the Ethereum ecosystem with Arbitrum One as its destination! ‍ …

As one of the main growing sub-sectors in the crypto industry, decentralized finance (DeFi) has faced a challenging year amid market dynamics, cyberattacks and regulatory uncertainty. Its future demands more transparency and clarity in the regulatory landscape, according to a panel discussion at the International Workshop on P2P Financial Systems 2022 on Dec. 1. Moderated by Cointelegraph’s editor-in-chief Kristina Cornèr with Gaspard Pedruzzi, CEO of APWine; Daniel Perez, co-founder of Mero; Hugo Philion, CEO of Flare, and Niall Roche, CTO-in-residence at the University College London School of Management as panelists, the discussion focused on the DeFi future among a disruptive …

According to a new proposal dated Dec. 1, directed acrylic graph network Fantom seeks to implement an affiliate program for its decentralized application, or dApp, developers with network gas fees. To fund this venture, the Fantom community has proposed slashing the protocol's current FTM token burn rate from 20% to 5%. In supporting the proposal, Fantom developers wrote: "We take what works in web2 and restructure it to fit the network's priorities, which means taking the ad monetisation model and extending it to gas monetisation for performing dApps that manage to attract a steady stream of users." The development team …

As the Solana ecosystem comes back from the aftershocks of the FTX liquidity earthquake, one of its leading automated market makers (AMM), Orca, announced a new integration. The AMM revealed a new Stripe integration which will power its fiat-to-crypto onramp, to make decentralized finance (DeFi) more accessible to users both in and out of the existing ecosystem. This new integration now enables fiat purchases, along with fiat-to-crypto transactions. Users can now purchase SPL tokens, which include USD Coin (USDC) and Solana (SOL) with fiat currencies. According to Ori Kawn, the co-founder of Orca, the new integration helps create wider access …

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 decentralized finance (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. Nansen’s report highlights the impact of the Merge in introducing staked ETH as an out-and-out cryptocurrency-native yield-bearing instrument that has quickly outstripped other collateralized yield-bearing services. The …

Crypto trading firm Auros Global appears to be suffering from FTX contagion after missing a principal repayment on a 2,400 Wrapped Ether (wETH) decentralized finance (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. M11 Credit suggests that it is always in close communication with its borrowers, particularly after events in the last month, and said Auros is experiencing a “short-term liquidity issue as a …

In changing the name of its parent company to Meta, Facebook put a stake in the ground: It would be the symbol of the evolution of the internet, the metaverse. Whether we liked it or not. According to Meta, the metaverse is “a set of digital spaces to socialize, learn, play and more.” Its first true attempt came in the form of Horizon Worlds, a virtual reality universe so lifeless and devoid of content that it has people asking if the metaverse is a step forward or backward. Thankfully, it won’t matter. The metaverse, a term from long before Facebook …