$3 billion-Anchorage Digital announces its support for STRK staking on Starknet

$3 billion-Anchorage Digital, the first crypto firm to secure a US national bank in 2021, has announced its support for STRK staking on Starknet. Now, STRK staking is officially live on the Anchorage Digital platform.

The support allows institutions to securely custody and stake STRK. According to Starknet, “A massive milestone opening the door to institutional players seeking trusted access to Starknet.”

Meanwhile, the announcement comes just two weeks after StarkNet revealed its plans to integrate Bitcoin staking into its ecosystem under proposal SNIP-31. The community approved the developments with a 93.6% vote in favor.

The integration will allow wrapped Bitcoin assets such as WBTC, LBTC, tBTC, and SolvBTC to participate in the network’s staking system. The consensus model will give Bitcoin a 25% weighting in staking power, while StarkNet’s native token STRK will hold the remaining 75%.

STRK users have regained confidence- STRK coin up 2%

The adoption follows the rollout of the Grinta upgrade, also referred to as v0.14.0. The upgrade aimed to overhaul core infrastructure with features like a decentralized sequencer, updated fee markets, and a new mempool system.

However, as reported by Cryptopolitan, the upgrade came with an unexpected outage that outraged users. Starknet’s status page says that between 2:23 AM and 4:36 AM UTC, users had gateways that weren’t working and transactions that weren’t accepted. 

Following this, developers had to reorganize the chain starting at block number 1,960,612, which erased almost an hour of network activity. Any transactions sent during that period had to be resubmitted.

That was the second time Starknet had gone down in less than two months. The network went down for 13 minutes on July 18 because of slow block creation and gateway delays. In April 2024, a rounding error problem caused a four-hour outage, which was worse than the previous one.

While developers assured users that block production had resumed and RPC providers were operational, confidence in the network’s reliability was shaken. Starknet’s native token, STRK, fell more than 3% during the downtime. However, now it is up 2.4% trading at 0.1249.

Starknet’s Ethereum Layer 2 network leverages ZK-rollups with STARK proofs to speed up transactions and lower fees. The protocol has been pushing new projects, like improving the SN Stack for appchain development.

Anchorage Digital to back early on-chain protocols

On the other hand, Anchorage Digital announced its plans to get into venture capital. Applications are already available, and a review will be placed this month. Accepted candidates will have to provide a demo at Token2049 in Singapore, which will take place in the first two days of October 2025.

According to the announcement, the initiative is intended to be a “true partnership,” including hands-on help with product development, engineering, and go-to-market plans. Teams will get assistance with picking market makers and building liquidity strategies. If the protocols integrate with Anchorage later, they gain access to its institutional clients immediately.

This announcement comes after the US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) lifted its consent order against Anchorage Digital three years after it was first issued in April 2022. The order was related to deficiencies in the crypto bank’s anti-money laundering (AML) controls and compliance with the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA). 

Meanwhile, in the first half of 2025, the company made $29.4 million in fiduciary income, showing that it is a reliable custodian for BlackRock’s spot crypto ETFs and other funds.

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