What’s next for Hemi? Find out here.

This week’s Midweek with Max session covered major updates across the board—engineering, incentives, governance, and developer infrastructure. As the team moves closer to the upcoming TGE, the pieces are rapidly falling into place.

Engineering and Infrastructure

The engineering team is finalizing key refactors to the FG and the PoP miner, enabling cleaner modular execution across the stack. These improvements are expected to land within days. Max also confirmed the team is putting the finishing edits on a new whitepaper outlining Hemi’s custom approach to BitVM. A draft will likely be shared before the end of the week.

Additional infrastructure work is underway to replace ProxyD with a more efficient RPC routing layer. This change will improve both transaction propagation and RPC reliability.

Incentives and Points

On incentives, the team is still determining the exact TGE date, but confirmed that mainnet incentive season one will continue for at least two more weeks. The testnet points checker will return soon as well. Final debugging is ongoing, particularly around PoP participation data. A more accurate and standalone point breakdown tool is in progress.

Testnet and mainnet points are calculated differently. Testnet points reflect participation and time spent; mainnet points reflect economic impact. There’s no fixed ratio between them, but both will contribute to the final points-based reward structure.

Points are awarded based on capital deployed per day, even if a Uniswap V3-style pool goes out of range. Safeguards prevent gaming the system with zero-liquidity ranges, but normal market movement is fully supported.

On the Horizon

• Hatchlings on mainnet: Expect this to happen very soon. Smart contract deployment took priority but is nearly complete.
• PoP payout algorithm: A new version is coming before the end of the month, with 72 hours’ notice before rollout.
• Node licenses: The resale market remains inactive. Those who purchased will receive their license or an equivalent outcome.

Hemi VM and Bitcoin Sync

A lengthy section of the session focused on how the hVM handles Bitcoin state. Hemi maintains two views: a lightweight consensus tracker and a full node running two blocks behind the Bitcoin tip. This setup avoids reorg-induced instability on the Hemi chain while allowing smart contracts to query Bitcoin state through precompiles.

If Bitcoin reorgs, the hVM reverts state for affected contracts, but the Hemi chain itself moves forward unaffected. Dapps must build around this behavior by waiting for adequate Bitcoin confirmations.

Gas griefing attacks via deep UTXO queries aren’t a concern—queries are bounded to the hVM’s current state and are indexed efficiently. Future upgrades will expand query capabilities (e.g., for BitVMv2 compatibility) without introducing reorg-related vulnerabilities.

PoP Security, Cross-Layer MEV, and L3 Incentives

PoP miners choose which H-chains they secure. Each H-chain maintains its own cadence for proofs, and high-frequency publishing on one chain won’t impact others, aside from fee market pressure. L3s pay Hemi directly; some of those fees are routed to PoP miners who publish to Bitcoin. This builds a cascading incentive structure: L4s → L3s → Hemi → Bitcoin.

Cross-layer MEV opportunities are minimized by Hemi’s architecture. The two-block delay and explicit confirmation waiting mean that users can’t front-run trades triggered by Bitcoin transactions. Dapps like ordinal marketplaces or native Bitcoin DEXs must build in waiting logic and user safeguards. Hemi won’t support mempool inclusion proofs due to their subjective nature across nodes.

MEV, Governance, and Community

A native MEV auction or PBS module isn’t on the roadmap for core protocol development. That’s likely to be handled by third-party services, similar to how MEV marketplaces work on Ethereum. Sequencers would choose which marketplace to interact with, and incentives would flow through those external systems.

For governance, the team will initially use off-chain voting (via Snapshot or a similar tool), with plans to migrate to an on-chain system that supports aggregated and enforceable governance actions—like adjusting fees in the Bitcoin tunnel.

NFT Marketplace and Alliance Tiers

An NFT marketplace is in the pipeline on the BD side, supporting Hatchlings and any other NFTs launched on Hemi. Tier 2 of the Hemi Alliance will begin early next week, with Tier 1 remaining open and visible. New tooling will also allow users to report points discrepancies directly from the dashboard.

Closing Notes

A reminder: Jeff Garzik will be speaking at Permissionless IV on June 24th at 2:30 PM in New York. If you’re in the area, don’t miss “Where to Build on Bitcoin.”

More updates are coming over the next two weeks. Follow the announcements on Discord and Twitter—and if you’re still working on demos or points tasks, finish them now.