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 these individuals, as they are crucial to the growth and development of decentralized finance. Meanwhile, Alexis Sirkia, chairman and co-founder of Yellow Network, analyzes Ethereum's L2 strategy, arguing that it is flawed due to a fundamental design issue. He suggests that the rollup model was never going to deliver a unified scale, as it was designed to address throughput rather than the actual constraint of how value moves between participants.
Rosenthal 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. Sirkia proposes that state channels could be a solution, allowing participants to transact peer-to-peer off-chain, with the base layer serving as the enforcement mechanism. The newsletter also features expert insights, principled perspectives, and a chart of the week, which shows Aave's market share sliding after the rsETH exploit.