Safeguarding DeFi Infrastructure Builders

Welcome to Crypto Long & Short, our institutional newsletter. This week, we focus on the importance of protecting the people behind DeFi infrastructure. Jennifer Rosenthal, chief communications officer at the DeFi Education Fund, emphasizes the need to safeguard software developers and the technology that enables DeFi. She notes that traditional finance companies are increasingly embracing DeFi-related initiatives and that it is crucial to protect the open-source, permissionless, and programmable technology that underpins 21st-century finance. Rosenthal highlights the Promoting Innovation in Blockchain Development Act of 2026, a bipartisan bill aimed at protecting software developers from misclassification under criminal code. Meanwhile, Alexis Sirkia discusses the limitations of Ethereum's L2 strategy, arguing that the rollup model was flawed from the start and that state channels offer a more promising approach to scaling. Sirkia contends that the industry's focus on throughput was misguided and that the true constraint lies in the movement of value between participants. He believes that state channels, which enable peer-to-peer transactions off-chain, offer a more secure and scalable solution.