The Block

Quick Take The SEC charged 17 people on Thursday for their roles in defrauding 40,000 investors in a $300 million crypto-related Ponzi scheme. Of the $300 million, most of that was not used for trading and some went toward the defendants’ lifestyles, including to buy a $1 million home in Texas, according to the complaint.

Quick Take Close to half of crypto owners plan to vote for presidential candidate Donald Trump in the upcoming elections, a poll from Paradigm found.

Quick Take Arbitrum Foundation announces program designed to invest 200 million ARB (about $400 million) in promoting gaming projects on its blockchain over a two-year period. The plan, which the foundation will ask its DAO to approve, would invest the majority of the funds into accelerating the growth of its gaming ecosystem through grants awarded to publishers and builders.

Quick Take Netherlands-based D2X has raised $10 million in a Series A funding round led by Point 72 Ventures.

Quick Take In a presentation to Emmer’s staff, the Minnesota Republican says, the central bank lists key duties for payment systems, including currency and the FedNow program — and at the bottom of the list are CBDCs. This comes as Fed Chair Jerome Powell told the Senate Banking Committee last week that the central bank was “nowhere near” making a recommendation or adopting a CBDC.

Quick Take Zerion is building a Layer 2 network that is designed to offer zero fees. The idea is that this should make it easier to onboard new people into crypto.

The recent crypto rally has been “propagated” by investors purchasing both gold and bitcoin futures since February rather than by investors shifting from gold to bitcoin, according to JPMorgan analysts.

Quick Take Offchain Labs has rolled out support for the Dencun upgrade in the Arbitrum ecosystem with the Atlas upgrade. The Atlas upgrade aims to reduce Ethereum Layer 2 transaction costs by incorporating blob transactions.

Quick Take Metis has launched an alpha version of its decentralized sequencer as part of the Layer 2 network’s plans to fully decentralize its infrastructure. The deployment is a step beyond the current centralized single-sequencer model used by Layer 2 rollups, though is only initially available to a small group of users.

Quick Take After initiating a final testnet, which Eigen Labs said will be operational soon, EigenLayer will launch its mainnet.