F1 × TOKEN2049 week: exchanges paid for F1's name and gained no visible users on-chain, while the Red Bull name was minted 539 times for free

01 — The dealsWho pays which team

TOKEN2049 Singapore runs October 7–8, 2026 and the Singapore Grand Prix follows on October 9–11, 2026. Crypto firms have paid F1 teams since the 2021 season. The roster has turned over: FTX left Mercedes when it fell, and Bybit's Red Bull deal ended before Gate's began. The 2026 grid looks like this. The values are what the sports business press reports. None of the firms shares the number, and we have not seen a contract.

One column matters more than the money. Four of these six firms have a token, and a token leaves a record. Every move of OKB, CRO, GT or MNT is public, and so is every wallet that sends one. That gives us a way to test whether a logo on a car turns into people using the product, without asking anyone.

The same record lets us test the reverse. Nobody at Red Bull or Formula 1 issued a token that we can find. Other people did, using their names, and every one of those launches is on the ledger too. So we can put the two side by side: the firms that paid for the name, and the people who took it.

We include MNT with a caveat. Bybit no longer sponsors Red Bull, and Mantle is a separate network that Bybit backed. We keep it in the table because its token is the closest on-chain trace of the sponsor that came before Gate, and because it turned out to be the clearest case of price and use going separate ways.

02 — Paying for the namePrice went up with the market. Use did not follow.

If a sponsor deal brings people to an exchange, some of them should touch its token. New wallets should appear. Sends should rise. So we counted them.

We took every cleared transfer of each sponsor token on Ethereum for thirty days, August 23 to September 21, 2026, and compared the first week to the last. Ethereum is neutral ground: none of these firms controls it. We also pulled CRO on Cronos, the chain Crypto.com runs, because our index covers it. Mantle, X Layer and GateChain are the home chains of the other three. They are outside that index, so we say so rather than guess.

The prices are the market. OKB and CRO rose about as much as ether did, and every one of them jumped on the same three days in the third week of September. Nothing in the price series points at Formula 1.

MNT is the odd one out, and it points the wrong way. It gained more than twice what ether did. Over the same month the number of wallets sending it each day fell by more than a fifth. Fewer people were using it while it got dearer. That is the shape of money rotating in, and we cannot see anyone new arriving.

CRO on Cronos is the one place use grew. Wallets sending it rose by half. Read that with care. The growth lands on the same rally days as all else. Cronos is a chain Crypto.com built, so traffic there takes in the firm's own products. It may be the sponsor deal working. It may be the market. The ledger alone does not settle it, and we are not going to pretend it does.

The wallet counts are small for what the deals are said to cost. On Ethereum, fewer than fifty wallets a day send OKB, the token of a firm said to pay McLaren about thirty-two million dollars a year. Fewer than twenty a day send GT, the token of the firm on the Red Bull Racing car. A global TV crowd in the hundreds of millions is, on this chain, a few dozen wallets.

Those few dozen include the exchanges themselves. We ranked the holders of each token whose balance changed in the month and ran the top wallets through our address labels.

In each case the biggest wallet moving the token in the month belongs to the exchange that issued it. That is normal for an exchange token. It also means the on-chain record of these tokens is, to a large degree, the exchange talking to itself. When we count wallets, the venues' own deposit and cash-out traffic is inside the number. The count of outside users is smaller still.

03 — Taking the nameThe Red Bull name was minted 539 times. The big ones are one machine.

We searched every chain our trading index covers for tokens carrying the names of the F1 teams, drivers, the series, the conference, and the drink brand that owns the Red Bull team. The search covered the same thirty days. What came back was a launch count in the hundreds, and it sorts into three very different piles.

Take the piles in reverse order. The conference's own name is borrowed all the time and is worth almost nothing on-chain. Seventy-seven tokens across seven chains between them traded less than a single mid-sized meme launch. Whoever mints a TOKEN2049 token gets a name that draws nobody.

The F1 team names draw a crowd, and the crowd showed up on schedule. Launches using Ferrari, McLaren, Formula One and driver names ran at about ten a week through August and early September, then jumped to forty in the week of September 13, the week the conference published its agenda and its promoters started posting driver names. Twenty more followed in the next three days. The biggest, a token called Formula One World Championship, did its whole volume in one hour on September 19, with over eighteen hundred wallets in the first fifteen minutes and a top wallet whose buys and sells matched to within four percent across nearly two hundred trades. Sixteen tokens named F1CAT or F1 chain launched inside the same hour on September 20, which is the signature of a rumour spreading through launch bots rather than of any single crew.

Then there is the Red Bull pile, which is a different thing altogether. Five hundred and thirty-nine tokens with the same name in a month is a template, and most of them are dust: a fifth traded less than a hundred dollars. The volume sits in six tokens, and those six are one machine. All six launched through Meteora. Five ran within fourteen hours of each other on August 24 and 25, and the same wallets made the round trips in all five. The sixth is the September 17 run we found first, which used ten different wallets and the identical design.

The design is the same every time, so we followed the money on the biggest run. A bankroll of about 1,860 SOL moved through five fresh addresses in one evening. Each one held it for a few minutes, paid the round-tripping wallets, took their returns, and passed the whole sum on.

The September 17 run had its own hub, its own relay and its own ten wallets, and moved its bankroll of about 1,600 SOL out to a fresh address the next morning by the same route. We have not connected the two bankrolls to each other. Whether that is one crew or two people running the same script is a question the ledger has not answered yet. We have written up this shape before on Arc, in the fake SOL market and in our test of whether wash trading ever draws a crowd. Who runs it is unknown, and nothing in the record ties it to any company, team, driver or event.

One more caveat belongs here. RedBull is the drink brand before it is the racing team, and a token named after it may be borrowing the can rather than the car. We cannot separate the two from a name. What we can say is that the machine chose this name in the month the team's sport shares a city with the crypto conference, and that F1 team names, which have no drink to fall back on, rose fourfold in the same window.

04 — The court recordA live case that names an F1 team

One lawsuit connects Formula 1 to a crypto exchange today. It sits in federal court in Miami as In re FTX Cryptocurrency Exchange Collapse Litigation, case number 23-md-03076. The piece of it that matters here was filed against the Mercedes F1 team on November 27, 2023.

The claim is about promotion. FTX had paid Mercedes to carry its name. The people suing say that made the team a promoter of FTX's products, among them its FTT token and its yield accounts. They say those were unregistered securities. Mercedes has not been found liable for anything, and nothing here says it should be.

Under the reading the judge allowed, a promoter can be liable for helping sell an unregistered security whether or not it knew anything was wrong. That is a claim in a pending case, and courts narrow claims all the time. We raise it because four teams and the series are doing the thing the Mercedes filing describes right now, and because the same month shows what the name is worth to people who never signed a contract at all.

05 — Which way credibility flowsThe name did more for the people who took it than for the ones who paid.

Put the two directions together and the answer is lopsided.

The exchanges paid, by the press estimates, tens of millions of dollars for the F1 name. On the one chain none of them controls, the ledger cannot see a single new user arrive. Three of four sponsor tokens lost sending wallets over the month. The one that grew did so on its own chain, on the market's rally days. The largest holder of each token is the exchange itself. If F1's credibility transferred to these firms, it did not transfer into anything a wallet does.

The people who took the name paid nothing and got a crowd on demand. The Red Bull name alone was attached to over five hundred tokens in a month and to seventy million dollars of trading, most of it manufactured by twenty wallets and a bankroll that changes address every few minutes. F1 team names went from a trickle to a flood in the exact week the conference began putting drivers in its posters. The conference's own name, minted seventy-seven times, drew nothing at all.

So credibility, measured on-chain, flows in one direction only. The sport lends it. The exchanges rent it and cannot show what it bought. The machines take it free and turn it into volume. The drivers on the conference stage are the reason the machines chose this month, and that is the only part they play.

06 — MethodWhat we counted, what stayed out

Transfer counts cover every cleared ERC-20 transfer of each contract on Ethereum from August 23 to September 21, 2026. Each is counted per UTC day with distinct senders and receivers. Week 1 is August 23–29, 2026 and week 4 is September 15–21, 2026. Cronos figures come from the same query against our Cronos index. Prices are our DEX-based daily closes, pooled across chains for each asset. OKB and CRO trade thinly on DEXs, so those prices are a proxy. GT has too little DEX trading to price this way at all. Holder rankings cover wallets whose balance changed in the window.

The name search ran against our trading index over the same thirty days and every chain it covers. The Red Bull count matches the exact names RedBull official and RedBull Official Token, in any letter case, on Solana. The F1 count matches Ferrari, McLaren, Formula One, Formula 1, Verstappen, Leclerc, Lando Norris, Grand Prix, F1CAT, Red Bull Racing, and F1 as a symbol or as a separate word in the name, on Solana, keeping tokens with over a thousand dollars of trading and dropping a Japanese festival token that matched Ferrari. The TOKEN2049 count matches that name with or without a space, on every chain. A token's launch day is the first hour it traded. Volume per token is the sum of its trades over the window, taken once per token from the deduplicated token index. Round-trip and funding figures come from launch statistics over the first fifteen minutes after each token's first trade, and from native SOL transfers to and from the wallets named.

Things we did not do: read any sponsor contract, measure anything on Mantle, X Layer or GateChain, follow the August 24 bankroll past its sixth address, or connect it to the September 17 bankroll. We also ran no query that could tell us who owns any wallet.

07 — SourcesWhat rests on something other than the chain

08 — Still openQuestions we could not close