“The best things to come out of Hemi won’t be built by us—they’ll be built by you.”

The first-ever Hemi Protocol Engineering AMA gave the community a look under the hood of the tech stack that powers Hemi. Max Sanchez, Joshua, John (JCV), and Antonio from the core protocol engineering team walked through everything from Bitcoin finality to the future of decentralized sequencing and the nitty-gritty of hVM internals.

Here’s a recap of what’s happening and what’s next.

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Two Teams, One Protocol

At Hemi, engineering is split into two focus areas. The apps team handles UI, backend tools, and user-facing integrations. The protocol team focuses on the core protocol: hVM, consensus, daemons, POP mining, BitVM, and more.

The AMA featured the protocol engineers—people who spend their days building and maintaining the core infrastructure that connects Bitcoin and Ethereum into a secure, programmable environment.

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Refactoring the Stack

One of the biggest projects underway is a full refactor of the Hemi daemons—breaking out and modularizing services like BFG, BSS, OpNode, and OpGeth. The goal is to make it easier to run nodes in different configurations. Whether you’re a payment processor, a DApp builder, or just want to run a POP miner without relying on public infra, the new structure will let you pick the minimal setup needed for your use case.

The team’s also shipping support for things like running a standalone TBC (tiny Bitcoin client) node, integrating BFG as a standalone Bitcoin finality service, and expanding node configurability.

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POP Mining and Finality

POP mining—the process of publishing Hemi state to Bitcoin—is central to Hemi’s model. With the updated tooling, users can mine POP points using their own local stacks. Testnet POP point dashboards are now live and reflect deduplicated address data, giving miners a more accurate view of their activity and rewards.

While testnet supported browser-based POP mining, the team has deprecated the Web POP miner for mainnet due to security concerns. Browsers aren’t secure enough to handle key material, and smart miners will use the CLI or run local infrastructure.

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ZK Proofs, BitVM Tunnels, and More

The protocol team is also working on adding zero-knowledge settlement to Ethereum. This unlocks fast finality with fallbacks to optimistic proofs. Alongside that effort is development on BitVM-based Bitcoin tunnels—making capital-efficient, secure Bitcoin bridging possible without relying on custodians.

These tunnels will enable a more secure vault system for bridging BTC to Hemi, reducing reliance on overcollateralized vaults over time.

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Decentralized Sequencing

Hemi’s long-term roadmap includes decentralizing its sequencer. Likely based on a variant of Ethereum’s proof-of-stake, the system will benefit from Bitcoin finality via Proof-of-Proof, while gaining liveness-preserving features of PoS consensus. The team is also exploring implementing single-slot finality for even faster confirmations.

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Chain Builder and the L3 Future

Chain Builder is Hemi’s upcoming Layer 3 ecosystem. It allows developers to launch custom L3s on Hemi that inherit Bitcoin security through Hemi’s aggregation layer. L3s can opt into hVM, Proof-of-Proof, and shared sequencing/data availability for cheaper, more secure chain launches.

By anchoring state to Hemi (and ultimately Bitcoin), L3s can interoperate across the Hemi network with mutual Bitcoin finality—a powerful security guarantee without high on-chain fees.

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HVM: Bitcoin Inside the EVM

hVM gives Solidity developers native access to Bitcoin’s state—without oracles, relays, or trusted third parties. It’s built around a deterministic, fully-indexed Bitcoin node (TBC) that mirrors the Bitcoin state machine inside Hemi. Through precompiles and the HemiBitcoinKit, contracts can query the UTXO set, detect transactions, and build applications that interact with native Bitcoin directly from EVM code.

This makes it possible to build Bitcoin-native apps like non-custodial DEXs, lending protocols, BRC20 infrastructure, and even Bitcoin-aware DAOs—all in Solidity.

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Calling All Builders

To support external devs, the team is launching a semi-private Builders Channel on Discord. It will give direct access to protocol engineers for anyone serious about building on Hemi. Expect criteria for entry, but the goal is to make it easy for serious developers to get the support they need.

As JCV put it: “The best things to come out of Hemi won’t be built by us—they’ll be built by you.”

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What’s Next

More AMAs are coming. Future sessions will cover the BitVM design in detail, the economics of POP, and more. If you’re working on a project, experimenting with hVM, or just want to get deeper into the protocol, the Builders Channel will be the place to do it.

Thanks to everyone who joined the session. Hemi’s growing fast—and this community is what will shape it next.

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Want to build on Hemi?
Join the Builders Channel on Discord. Ask questions. Share your idea. You might be building the next big thing on Bitcoin and Ethereum.