Safeguarding DeFi Infrastructure Builders

Welcome to Crypto Long & Short, our institutional newsletter. This week, we focus on the need to safeguard the people building DeFi 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, comments on the flaws in Ethereum's L2 strategy, arguing that the rollup model was designed around the wrong assumption that the limitation was throughput, rather than how value moves between participants. He suggests that state channels, which allow participants to transact peer-to-peer off-chain, may be a more effective solution. The newsletter also features an analysis of the market, including the impact of the rsETH exploit on Aave's market share and the potential for perpetual futures to shift the derivatives market.