Welcome to Crypto Long & Short, our institutional newsletter. This week, we focus on the need to safeguard the people driving DeFi innovation. Jennifer Rosenthal, Chief Communications Officer at the DeFi Education Fund, highlights the importance of protecting open-source, permissionless, programmable, non-custodial, globally accessible, and interoperable technology.
She notes that traditional finance companies are increasingly embracing DeFi-related initiatives, and it's crucial to defend high-level policy objectives that support this growth. Rosenthal references the 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 Ethereum's scaling problem, arguing that the rollup model was flawed from the start. He believes that state channels offer a better solution by allowing peer-to-peer transactions off-chain, eliminating the need for intermediaries. Sirkia also touches on the CFTC's plan to approve the first U.S. framework for perpetual futures and the potential impact on the crypto derivatives market.