Safeguarding DeFi Infrastructure Builders

Welcome to 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 the technology and infrastructure that makes DeFi valuable. She highlights the need for policy objectives that defend the neutral, decentralized nature of the technology. Rosenthal notes that software developer protections have become a topic of conversation in recent market structure and crypto policy discussions, with many industry participants agreeing that protecting the people building DeFi is essential. For instance, the Promoting Innovation in Blockchain Development Act of 2026 aims to protect software developers from misclassification under criminal code. Meanwhile, Alexis Sirkia comments on Ethereum's L2 strategy, arguing that it is failing due to a fundamental design flaw. Sirkia believes that the rollup model was never going to deliver a unified scale because it was designed around the wrong assumption - that Ethereum's limitation was throughput, when the actual constraint was how value moves between participants. He suggests that state channels could be a solution, allowing participants to transact peer-to-peer off-chain and eliminating the need for intermediaries. The newsletter also includes headlines of the week, a chart of the week, and invitations to listen, read, watch, and engage with the content.