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If you’ve ever wanted to see your NFT race by on a Formula 1 car, now’s your chance. Just two days before the Grand Prix in Melbourne is due to kick off, Kraken announced that it’s partnering with Williams Racing to become the team’s first-ever official crypto and web3 partner.

Kraken, which earlier this month acknowledged a regulatory “weird place” amid the recent shuttering of its on-chain staking services for U.S. clients to settle charges brought by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, said the partnership will connect racing fans around the world to the crypto community “on a quest for financial freedom.”

The crypto exchange said it plans to give selected Kraken NFT holders a chance to see their digital collectibles displayed on the rear wing the Williams Racing car, which will also feature Kraken branding for the remainder of the 2023 FIA Formula One World Championship season. The exchange said it will to announce additional benefits including exclusive content, fan pop-ups and co-branded merchandise. 

“We’re excited to get the partnership underway to offer our fans cutting-edge crypto and web3 experiences, while also enabling Kraken to reach new institutional clients and businesses through our network and events,” Williams Racing commercial director James Bower said in a statement. 

Crypto’s Formula 1 love affair

While there has been a small drop in crypto-related Formula 1 sponsorship this year amid a broader challenges across the industry, the web3 sector is still “going strong” with new brands continuing to join the race, according to RTR Sports Marketing.

In 2021, the now defunct exchange FTX announced a long-term sponsorship deal with F1’s Mercedes-AMG Petronas that was supposed to have spanned multiple race seasons. 

Crypto.com, which cut 20% of its workforce amid sector-wide layoffs earlier this year, continues to be a global Formula 1 partner along with heavyweights Aramco, AWS, DHL, Heineken, MSC Cruises, Firelli, Qatar Airways, Rolex and Salesforce. 

© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

The index, which measures the current sentiment in the crypto market, reached its highest point since 2021 last week hitting a rating of 68.

Ethereum restaking protocol EigenLayer has closed its $50 million Series A fundraising round. The Block first reported in February that EigenLabs, the team behind EigenLayer, was seeking to raise $50 million at a $250 million post-equity valuation and a $500 million token valuation.

The round is led by Blockchain Capital and sees participation from other investors such as Coinbase Ventures, Polychain Capital, Hack VC and Electric Capital, the company said in a release. The valuation terms were not disclosed.

The yet-to-launch restaking protocol previously raised $14.5 million in a seed round led by Polychain Capital and Ethereal Ventures. The startup was founded in 2021 by Sreeram Kannan, an assistant professor at the University of Washington, Seattle. It enables users to restake their ether (ETH) and innovate at the consensus layer without needing to launch a whole new blockchain, the company said.

“We started working on EigenLayer in the hopes of creating a new model, in which developers can easily consume trust, instead of needing to build trust, and design powerful systems of assurances that make the crypto ecosystem safer and more useful,” said  Kannan in the release.

What is restaking?

Restaking enables individuals to use their already-staked ether to secure other protocols. EigenLabs plans to launch the initial version of the protocol in phases throughout the rest of this year, the company said.

EigenLayer is currently at the forefront of thinking about staking and restaking to increase the security of decentralized services, said The Block Research’s director of data Simon Cousaert as part of his 2023 predictions.

“EigenLayer’s core innovation of restaking is a game changer for bootstrapping new cryptoeconomic networks,” said Bart Stephens, founder and managing partner at Blockchain Capital, in the release. “By lowering the cost of trust and capital, it opens up opportunities for entrepreneurs to experiment and build while significantly easing the financial barriers that have hindered innovation in the past.”

© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Blockchain Capital led the round for the solution that allows Ethereum stakers to reuse those tokens.

The Shapella network upgrade will be activated on the Ethereum mainnet on April 12, following an official consensus reached by core developers.

The Shapella upgrade will happen at network epoch 194,048, according to a blog post by the Ethereum Foundation on Tuesday. An epoch in Ethereum is a bundle of 32 blocks on the network and this epoch is expected to happen at 6:27 pm EDT on April 12. Tuesday’s statement confirms previous estimates for the upgrade.

Shapella is a portmanteau of Shanghai and Capella. These are two network upgrades that will happen simultaneously. The Shanghai upgrade is for the consensus layer and Capella is for the execution layer.

The Shapella upgrade as a whole will introduce EIP-4895 to the Ethereum network. This EIP will enable the withdrawal of staked ether for the first time ever. Shapella also has other network improvements aimed at optimizing transaction fees for certain activities. These upgrades have been tested on multiple testnets.

Tuesday’s upgrade confirmation also stated that the bug bounty program for Shapella vulnerabilities will run until April 5. The Ethereum Foundation recently doubled the bug bounty reward to $500,000.

© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Crypto prices traded flat on Tuesday after yesterday’s drop after news that the CFTC will pursue legal action against exchange giant Binance.

Bitcoin was trading around $26,943 by 11 a.m. EDT, down 0.7% in the past 24 hours, according to TradingView data. The cryptocurrency had been on a two-week tear amid a banking crisis in the U.S., but it fell sharply after the CFTC’s lawsuit against Binance became public.

“CFTC vs. Binance is now an important driver of price action,” crypto trading firm Cumberland wrote on Twitter.

There are three potential outcomes for the CFTC’s actions against Binance, the post suggested: “(1) Clearer guardrails, but no material penalty (i.e. they win the case scenario); (2) Clearer guardrails, but a manageable penalty; (3) Clearer guardrails, but significant penalties.”

While the first scenario would be bullish for crypto, Cumberland noted, the other two could be quite bearish. “But since the path for any of these in the near term is still unclear, near term price action and volatility are similarly uncertain,” it said.

Either way, it said, the lawsuit will “certainly exacerbate tightness” and will likely “damage liquidity.”

Ether traded higher, up 2.7% over the past 24 hours to around $1,743. 

Crypto companies

Crypto-related companies followed a similar market trend to bitcoin, trading mostly flat. 

Coinbase was down 0.03% by 11 am in New York, while MicroStrategy — which announced that it bought $150 million in bitcoin in the past few weeks — fell 2%.

© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Formula 1 team Williams Racing signed U.S. crypto exchange Kraken as a sponsor after losing one of its most prominent drivers, Nicholas Latifi, who reportedly earned the team a large amount of sponsorship fees.

The APT43 group steals crypto to fund operations and launders it through cloud mining services.

The newly announced startup will help developers launch Optimism-based applications.

Controversial rules unveiled last year would discourage banks from holding assets such as bitcoin that are deemed risky