Biweekly, we’ll round up the hottest news across the DeFi ecosystem to help you keep up to speed. 

The crypto market cap climbed 15% in a week following Ethereum Merge date details shared by the EF’s Tim Beiko.  (CoinTelegraph) 

Solana has physical stores now? You might remember from a previous article that Solana is releasing SMS, the Solana Mobile Stack, aimed at developing crypto-native mobile devices. It seems the Solana team is now standing up brick and mortar storefronts to promote SMS. (Twitter) 

Nic Carter argues that the series of failures by centralized creditors and lenders like Celsius and Voyager are not detrimental to the space, but will catalyze evolutions. (CoinDesk) 

Audius, a music NFT platform that aims to rival SoundCloud, appeared to market sell its entire holdings of the native Audius token in one transaction, likely from a governance exploit. (Etherscan) 

The Ethereum Name Service (ENS) is heating up. The protocol that creates usernames for wallet addresses saw ATH volumes this past month, including an astounding $1M bid on amazon.eth. (Twitter) 

It’s possible to instant message chat from wallet to wallet on chain now thanks to a new product by Wallet Connect, a wallet proxy for web3 activities. (WalletConnect) 

Weeks following its acquisition of aggregator Genie.xyz, Uniswap Labs announces that it will add support for decentralized NFT marketplace SudoSwap. The integration will allow users to purchase NFTs using the Uniswap platform while accessing the on-chain liquidity offered by sudoAMM. (The DeFiant) 

The scalability wars of Layer 2 ‘22 are heating up. Earlier this week Polygon open-sourced the code for zkEVM, its Layer 2 rollup that uses zero-knowledge technology. Polygon describes it as “the first EVM-equivalent ZK L2.” (The DeFiant)