This week’s update brought to you by Jeremy Nation, filling in for Rick.

We’re heading into July with a full plate of updates, events, and technical progress. On this week’s Midweek with Max, Jeremy stepped in to host while much of the team is traveling, and Max joined to provide a detailed look at what’s moving behind the scenes. From Permissionless to the upcoming Engineering AMA, there’s a lot to keep an eye on.

The team is still riding momentum from a successful showing at Permissionless IV, where Hemi had a strong presence both on the ground and in media. Several founder interviews and podcasts are queued for release, and more news stories should be landing soon. Community energy has also been high—especially around memes, mascot experiments, and the ongoing antics of the “Hemi intern” AI persona. All of this points to a creative, engaged user base that’s helping shape Hemi’s public voice.

Next week brings a double-header: our usual Tuesday session of Midweek with Max, followed by a special Engineering AMA on Wednesday, July 9 at 11 a.m. ET. This AMA will dig deeper into tech topics, including questions about infrastructure, protocol updates, and future roadmap elements. If you have questions, now’s the time to submit them.

On the engineering side, Max shared that the Pectra upgrade has been rescheduled to Thursday, July 4 at 11 a.m. ET after a minor coordination hiccup with some node operators. A new #node-updates channel in Discord will now serve as the central location for upgrade instructions, flags, and releases. There may also be a Telegram channel down the line, but for now, all upgrade communication lives in Discord.

For Hatchling NFT holders, a snapshot was taken last Wednesday, and mainnet minting should be complete by end of day tomorrow. Meanwhile, final touches are being applied to the BitVM whitepaper, which will likely be released ahead of the AMA to give the community a chance to review and prepare questions. In parallel, several pull requests are being finalized across the BFG and Popminer daemons as part of a broader refactor effort. Once those settle, documentation will follow.

As always, community questions were front and center. The most common: When is TGE? The answer remains the same—very soon. The team is locking in the last pieces, with a focus on choosing a date we can actually stick to. As Max noted, it’s better to get it right once than to shift timelines multiple times.

On node licenses, there are no new sales planned. The market isn’t active enough to justify re-engaging at this point. However, anyone who purchased a license will be supported. That could mean receiving the license itself or something equivalent with less operational overhead. Refunds are not available right now, but the team is committed to honoring those purchases.

Points and rewards continue to move forward. One final recalculation is underway for testnet pop points, now that a complete export from Absinthe has been received. On mainnet, Season One will officially end just before the TGE, with a snapshot taken at that cutoff. Any on-chain activity after that won’t be included in rewards calculations. There will be a short review period between the snapshot and distribution to resolve discrepancies.

Several liquidity pools—such as ethmax, haremax, and vCredMax—were flagged by the community as unclear in terms of point eligibility. These have been passed to John Greenwood for confirmation, and we’ll share updates as they come. Meanwhile, Absinthe remains our points provider, largely due to the flexibility they offer for tracking unique on-chain behaviors. While slower at times, they’ve started migrating to SubSquid, which should improve data performance and indexing reliability.

The Hatchlings NFT migration is nearly done, and while the timeline for an NFT marketplace on Hemi is still TBD, several candidates are in the pipeline. No deployments have been finalized yet.

One community question focused on Hemi’s ability to support AI-focused blockchain applications. Max explained that Hemi’s architecture—particularly Chain Builder and Proof-of-Proof—offers tools that could support timestamped model inference, zero-knowledge verification of model training, and AI-optimized chain configurations. While many of these ideas are forward-looking, Hemi is well-positioned to support that kind of application-layer innovation over time.

Proof-of-Proof mining is also evolving. A new calculation method for rewards will roll out soon, likely within the next week. Details on the algorithm and dashboard updates will be shared once the new system is live. A new dashboard is on the roadmap too, with better visuals and functionality than the current testnet version, but there’s no firm timeline for release.

A few final points: the team hasn’t yet gathered internal data on Bitcoin spending by PoP miners but expects to have that for next week’s call. The $25K Satori trading competition prize is being managed by the BD team, most of whom are currently at ETHCC in France. Distribution is pending but on the radar.

The wrap-up emphasized one message: the community continues to power Hemi’s growth, from memes to testnet activity. With upgrades landing, BitVM around the corner, and the token event close to announcement, the weeks ahead are going to be important. Keep your questions coming, stay active in Discord, and we’ll see you for both the Tuesday and Wednesday sessions next week.