Catenaa, Thursday, July 10, 2025-Crypto exchange Kraken is seeking community participation to name the mascot for its new Ethereum Layer 2 network, Ink, and plans to reward users who submit winning names.
The initiative taps JokeRace, a blockchain-based contest platform, to manage the naming competition, the company announced Thursday.
Kraken introduced the mascot as a purple, spiky cartoon monster representing Ink, a Layer 2 network built using the OP Stack and developed in-house.
The Ink Foundation, formed recently, aims to launch a native INK token in 2025 with a capped supply of 1 billion tokens, designed to encourage ecosystem growth and liquidity.
JokeRace, launched in 2022 by David Phelps and Siobhán McCaffery, facilitates no-code, onchain contests across more than 90 EVM-compatible blockchains.
The platform features a sybil-resistant voting mechanism, where users pay per vote to deter spam, and enables smart contract-triggered actions like token transfers or DAO proposals based on contest results. JokeRace has been previously used by Polygon, Farcaster, and The Block.
The platform supports “enter-and-earn” contests, rewarding winning submissions, and “vote-and-earn” contests, which pay participants who vote on outcomes.
Phelps described this as a “persuasion market” where users curate internet content for rewards.
JokeRace raised $3 million in funding last July led by Maven 11, aimed at expanding marketing and business development. Kraken’s Ink network and its community-driven mascot naming contest highlight growing use of blockchain platforms to engage users through interactive, incentivized campaigns.
