Safeguarding the Creators of DeFi Infrastructure

Welcome to our institutional newsletter, Crypto Long & Short. This week, we focus on the need to safeguard the people building decentralized finance infrastructure. Jennifer Rosenthal, chief communications officer at the DeFi Education Fund, emphasizes the importance of protecting the technology and infrastructure that make DeFi valuable. She highlights the introduction of the bipartisan Promoting Innovation in Blockchain Development Act of 2026, which aims to protect software developers from misclassification under criminal code. Meanwhile, Alexis Sirkia, chairman and co-founder of Yellow Network, discusses the limitations of Ethereum's L2 strategy, arguing that the rollup model was designed around the wrong assumption that the limitation was throughput, when the actual constraint was how value moves between participants. He advocates for state channels as a solution to eliminate the need for intermediaries and enable peer-to-peer transactions off-chain.