Safeguarding DeFi Infrastructure Builders

Welcome to our institutional newsletter, Crypto Long & Short. This week, we explore the need to safeguard the people behind DeFi infrastructure. Jennifer Rosenthal, chief communications officer at the DeFi Education Fund, highlights the importance of protecting software developers and the technology that enables DeFi. Meanwhile, Alexis Sirkia, chairman and co-founder of Yellow Network, comments on the shortcomings of Ethereum's L2 strategy, citing a flawed assumption about the platform's limitations. Rosenthal emphasizes the need for policy objectives that defend the technology and infrastructure that make DeFi valuable, such as the bipartisan Promoting Innovation in Blockchain Development Act of 2026, which aims to protect software developers from misclassification under criminal code. Sirkia argues that Ethereum's scaling problem was never about throughput, but rather about how value moves between participants, and that state channels, which allow for peer-to-peer transactions off-chain, offer a more viable solution. The newsletter also features headlines and a chart of the week, discussing the growing connections between traditional finance and the crypto sector, as well as the impact of smart contract exploits on the market.