This week's Midweek with Max was a full house, and the session delivered across engineering, community, and marketing. Max revealed that a hardened release of op-geth is on its way, addressing several denial-of-service-type issues the team wants to fix proactively following last week's network incident. The update will be optional but recommended for node operators, and the team is working to get it out quickly.
The bigger technical story continues to be the op-reth transition. Testing and fuzzing are ramping up across both the legacy Bitcoin indexer mode, now running with a Rust RPC wrapper, and the new ZK-focused Oxygen indexer built for ZK-provability. Max confirmed a public alpha is targeted for within the next few weeks.
The most community-facing announcement was a capture-the-flag competition currently in development. The CTF will be fully onchain, scoring, flag validation, and leaderboard. It’s designed to accommodate a wide skill range, from developers who've written their first Solidity contract to ZK practitioners. Challenges will cover general cryptography, implementation mistakes in crypto libraries, onchain contract exploits ranging from basic reentrancy to multi-step crosschain attacks, and ZK and FHE categories as well. HVM-exclusive challenges are also planned to give builders hands-on practice writing Bitcoin-aware DeFi infrastructure. A tentative window of July or August is on the schedule for now.
A standout Q&A exchange covered Hemi's design philosophy around the liveness vs. safety tradeoff. Max's position was direct: safety wins. The hBitVM proof system enforces minimum thresholds of consensus power on both Bitcoin and Ethereum before a ZK proof can be computed. If those thresholds aren't met, the proof can't be constructed. His reasoning: a halted network is a manageable problem everyone can coordinate around; a fork or reorg gives attackers far more to work with. There's no such thing as absolute security, only relative hardness.
On the marketing side, Hemi's governance integration with Aragon has been announced. This week's Protocol Engineering Office Hours were held in Discord Wednesday evening at 4 PM EDT, so next week get ready for early AM office hours.
Join Hemi’s Discord and submit questions ahead of next week’s Midweek with Max, now streaming live on X, LinkedIn, and YouTube every week at 8 AM PDT / 11 AM EDT.