Ethereum climbed to its highest level in over a month, briefly touching $2,200 on Friday. The price swing comes amidst a new change among ETFs focused on the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization. 

Yesterday, ETHB — BlackRock’s iShares Staked Ethereum Trust ETF Shares — started trading on Nasdaq, making the investment vehicle the first from the financial titan to include staking, the process of locking up tokens to help secure the network’s consensus mechanism in exchange for rewards. 

The nascent staking ETF has nearly $150 million in net assets, drawing in $43.5 million in inflows on its first day, data from SoSoValue shows. “Pretty good start for any ETF,” Bloomberg ETF analyst James Seyffart noted in a social media post.

While ETHB is BlackRock’s first ethereum staking ETF, it’s not first to market. The Grayscale Ethereum Staking Mini ETF launched in 2024, while the REX-Osprey ETH Staking ETF rolled out last year. 

Ethereum ETFs have seen nearly $157.7 million of inflows in March, on track to record their first monthly inflow since October. 

Meanwhile, the Ethereum Foundation published its mandate, “a document that serves as part constitution, part manifesto, and part guide for the Ethereum Foundation,” on Friday. 

“Our Mandate to EF states what must be cherished to protect the ultimate reason for Ethereum’s existence: user self-sovereignty,” the Ethereum Foundation Board wrote. “To be a part of EF, our own teams must remember that Ethereum must, above all, remain censorship resistant, open source, private, and secure (CROPS).”

The mandate is a new chapter in how the organization views its position in the world, according to ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin. “We must see ourselves not just as the Ethereum community, but also as  maintainers of the Ethereum tool within what you might call the CROPS community,” Buterin said. “This means open-mindedness to new conceptions of what things in the world are our natural allies.”

Memory stocks Micron, Sandisk, Western Digital, and Seagate Technology Holdings rose again Friday, putting these crucial providers of chips for AI inference work on track for big weekly gains after last week’s steep losses following the outbreak of war with Iran.

There’s no obvious trigger for the move higher for these shares this week, other than a bit of a recovery in the AI trade more broadly — AI beneficiaries like IT cable and connections maker Amphenol and custom chip and networking company Marvell Technology clawed back some gains this week — perhaps due Oracle’s earnings earlier, and some mean reversion to boot.

Micron is due to report earnings after the close of trading on Wednesday, with the company catching a couple price target hikes this week, including one from Wedbush on Friday.

Sandisk is something of a different story, as its enormous gains over the last 12 months — roughly 1,200% — have made it a momentum play beloved by the retail crowd.

It was up about 20% this week at around 11 a.m. ET. And its nearly 170% gain this year keeps the stock on top of the S&P 500, in terms of price performance.

President Trump’s meme coin has risen 54.6% in the last 24 hours to trade at a more than one-month high. The token’s price performance is outpacing an overall rise throughout the wider crypto industry, boosting its total market capitalization 4.3%.

What’s driving it? Something we’ve seen before: on Thursday, GetTrumpMemes announced that the top 297 holders of $TRUMP will have the opportunity to attend a gala luncheon next month at Mar-a-Lago, where the president will be a keynote speaker.

Last year a similar competition was announced, and the top $TRUMP whales attended a dinner with him at the Trump National Golf Club in Washington, DC, drawing supporters, critics, and protestors to the event.

Despite the recent spike, the cryptocurrency is down 94.2% from its all-time high of $73.43, set the day before Trump’s inauguration last year, when it topped a $70 billion valuation.

Crypto stocks rose in early Friday trading, riding a rebound in the price of bitcoin to more than $73,000.

Coinbase, Strategy, Circle, and MARA Holdings were among the biggest gainers of that cadre. Their end-of-the-week bounce might be getting a bit of extra oomph from the fact that companies have picked up a fair bit of interest from short sellers in 2026, as bitcoin fell about 15%.

Some of those shorts might be looking to quickly close out positions — which requires buying the stock — ahead of what could be another unpredictable weekend of war.

What happens in Vegas, keeps happening in Vegas.

Uber users in Las Vegas can now be matched with an electric Motional IONIQ 5 robotaxi along parts of the Strip and at select casinos, resorts, and the Town Square shopping district near the airport, the companies said. For now, each vehicle includes a human safety operator monitoring from behind the wheel, who the companies say will be removed by year’s end.

Uber and Hyundai-backed autonomous tech company Motional previously tested a service there in 2022. “Motional is ready to put our extensive ride hail experience to work with Uber again,” said David Carroll, vice president of commercialization at Motional, which paused its commercial deployments in 2024 to refocus on its core driverless technology after scaling back operations.

This time around, the companies will be joining a much more crowded field. Amazon-owned Zoox has been offering free rides along select destinations on the Strip since last year, and both Tesla’s Robotaxi and Alphabet-owned Waymo have plans to open up shop there in the near future.

Thanks to a spate of recent AV partnerships, Uber, which sold its own autonomous unit back in 2020, is finding itself at the center of the nascent robotaxi boom.

Shares of Klarna rose 6% in premarket trading on Friday after the company’s chairman, Michael Moritz, purchased shares worth ~$50 million.

Per the “buy now, pay later” giant’s regulatory filings reported late on Thursday, Moritz purchased over 3.47 million shares between March 3 and 11 through an associated entity in multiple open market purchase transactions. On the same day, the company also filed Chief Product Design Officer David Fock’s purchase, worth ~$0.4 million, made during the same period.

The filings showed that Klarna’s two other executives sold a total of 56,502 shares under preestablished plans.

Klarna has had a volatile few days, dropping 11% yesterday amid a tough day for the market as a whole, after the company’s post-IPO lockup period expired for early investors.

There’s been a lot of turnover lately at xAI, with numerous executive departures and, yesterday, news that the SpaceX-owned company was hiring two senior leaders from Cursor, an AI coding startup that’s raising funds at a $50 billion valuation.

The reason? “xAI was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up,” CEO Elon Musk posted on xAI-owned X yesterday, in response to a post about the Cursor hires. Earlier this month, Musk told a conference audience, “Grok is currently behind on coding.”

The news amounts to an admission of a reset inside xAI and an acknowledgment that the company is trailing AI peers like Anthropic and OpenAI in one of AI’s most commercially important applications: coding.