Safeguarding DeFi Infrastructure Builders

Welcome to Crypto Long & Short, our institutional newsletter. This week, we delve into the need to safeguard the people behind DeFi infrastructure. Jennifer Rosenthal, chief communications officer at the DeFi Education Fund, emphasizes the importance of protecting the technology and infrastructure that makes DeFi valuable. She highlights the introduction of the bipartisan Promoting Innovation in Blockchain Development Act, which aims to protect software developers from misclassification under criminal code. Meanwhile, Alexis Sirkia, chairman and co-founder of Yellow Network, argues that Ethereum's scaling problem was never about throughput, but rather about how value moves between participants. He proposes that state channels, which enable peer-to-peer transactions off-chain, could provide a solution to the fragmentation caused by rollups. Additionally, this week's headlines and chart of the week are discussed, including the impact of smart contract exploits on the market and Aave's TVL market share decline following the rsETH exploit.