Safeguarding DeFi Infrastructure Builders

Welcome to Crypto Long & Short, our institutional newsletter. This week, we focus on the need to safeguard the people behind DeFi infrastructure. Jennifer Rosenthal, chief communications officer at the DeFi Education Fund, emphasizes the importance of protecting open-source, permissionless, programmable, noncustodial, globally accessible, and interoperable technology. She highlights key policy objectives worth defending, including software developer protections. Rosenthal notes that the Promoting Innovation in Blockchain Development Act of 2026 aims to protect software developers from misclassification under criminal code. Meanwhile, Alexis Sirkia discusses Ethereum's scaling problem, 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. Sirkia suggests that state channels, which allow peer-to-peer transactions off-chain, could be a solution. The newsletter also covers recent headlines, including the impact of smart contract exploits on the market, and features a chart showing Aave's market share decline after the rsETH exploit.