Bitcoin and ether recorded their first losing week of 2023 after Kraken staking action

On February 11, 2023, bitcoin and ether were ending their first losing week of the year after several days of declines, interrupting the broad digital-asset rebound that had defined January. A TradingView snapshot reported by The Block at 3:15 p.m. Eastern placed bitcoin at approximately $21,630 and ether at $1,514. Over the publication’s preceding seven-day measurement window, bitcoin was down 7.6% and ether was down 9%.

A separate February 11 account using CoinGecko data reached a similar conclusion but captured slightly different values: bitcoin near $21,760 after a 7.5% seven-day decline and ether near $1,524 after an 8.5% decline. Those differences reflect continuously traded instruments, changing observation times and potentially different venue aggregation methods. Crypto has no universal weekly closing auction, so the figures are best treated as contemporaneous snapshots rather than a single official close.

The regulatory event behind the repricing

The losses followed the Securities and Exchange Commission’s February 9 settlement with Payward Ventures and Payward Trading, the entities commonly known as Kraken. The SEC charged them with failing to register the offer and sale of Kraken’s crypto-asset staking-as-a-service program. The companies agreed to cease the covered U.S. program and pay a combined $30 million in disgorgement, prejudgment interest and civil penalties, without admitting or denying the allegations.

Kraken said it would automatically unstake assets enrolled by U.S. clients, except staked ether, which would remain staked until withdrawals became available through Ethereum’s planned Shanghai upgrade. U.S. clients could not add new staked assets, while a separate Kraken subsidiary would continue offering staking outside the United States.

The order concerned Kraken’s intermediary service rather than proof-of-stake consensus as a technology. That distinction was material on February 11: users can interact with proof-of-stake networks through several arrangements, including operating validators, delegating tokens or transferring assets to a centralized provider. The SEC’s case addressed the investment arrangement Kraken offered and the disclosures the agency alleged were missing; it did not announce a blanket prohibition on protocol-level staking.

Why markets treated it as broader than one company

The settlement nevertheless introduced uncertainty for other U.S. intermediaries offering yield or staking products. Investors had to consider whether similar services could attract enforcement scrutiny, lose U.S. revenue or require operational changes. That interpretation was visible beyond token prices. The Block’s February 11 snapshot reported that Coinbase shares had fallen 22.6% over its weekly window, although equity-market moves cannot be assigned exclusively to one regulatory event.

The regulatory significance was also contested inside the SEC. Commissioner Hester Peirce dissented on February 9, arguing that staking services were not uniform and that the Commission should have developed workable guidance instead of using a single enforcement action to communicate its position. Her statement represented one commissioner’s view, not the Commission’s controlling action, but it documented contemporaneous disagreement over both process and scope.

What the February 11 data can establish

The verified record establishes that major crypto assets had surrendered part of January’s rally by February 11 and that market coverage associated the decline with heightened U.S. regulatory concern following the Kraken settlement. It does not prove that the enforcement action caused every part of the move. Bitcoin and ether trade continuously across fragmented global venues, while interest-rate expectations, liquidity, leverage and asset-specific news can affect prices simultaneously.

Accordingly, the strongest event-day conclusion is narrow: February 11 marked the first broadly reported losing week of 2023 for bitcoin and ether, with two independent market snapshots showing comparable seven-day declines. The SEC and Kraken records explain the immediate institutional development being repriced, while the precise causal share attributable to that settlement remains uncertain.