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.

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