Midweek with Max: Protocol Progress, Restaking Plans, and hVM Expansion

This week's Midweek with Max made its debut outside of Discord, going live for the first time on X, YouTube, and LinkedIn, with Max and the team covering engineering progress across several fronts and fielding the community questions that followed.

On the engineering side, PoP miner v5 is in late-stage optimization and headed to audit shortly. Translation of Hemi-specific changes from opgeth to opreth continues, with the largest piece of the work being a rebuild of how Bitcoin indexing happens inside the execution engine. Oxygen, originally developed for ZK provability, is being expanded to serve as the full Bitcoin data indexer that lives natively inside opreth. 

A minor veHEMI contract update completed its third round of internal review and is going out this week, unblocking the next veHEMI rewards distribution, targeted for the second week of May. Max framed the veHEMI system as the economic security center of the Hemi protocol. The next phase will use staked positions as collateral across decentralized sequencing, hBitVM participation (as covenant emulators or liquidity operators), the ZK Prover Marketplace (as compute complexity attesters), and the MinerFi threshold signature scheme. 

On governance, the smart contract side ships with this week's veHEMI update, and a well-known third-party voting platform is integrating the Hemi chain. Initial votes will cover lower-stakes items like community funding and protocol parameters, with bigger economic decisions added once participation patterns stabilize and the team can confirm meaningful engagement.

Max walked through the hVM architecture's advantages over Bitcoin header relay and reviewed candidate use cases the embedded Bitcoin node enables, including Bitcoin MEV marketplaces, non-custodial Bitcoin DEXs, atomic swaps across BRC-20s and Runes, Bitcoin-backed loans, and Bitcoin-backed stablecoins.

If you have additional questions for the Hemi crew, the inaugural Hemi Protocol Engineering Office Hours will go live in Discord tomorrow at 8 AM PDT / 11 AM EDT / 3 PM UTC. The hours will then go on an alternating biweekly with a 1 PM PDT / 4 PM EDT / 8 PM UTC slot to cover different time zones. The Hemi Guild beta opens next week as well, with Discord members holding builder, beta tester, or creator roles getting early access. BitFi will be joining Built on Hemi later this month, with dates to follow, and several partner announcements are expected later this week.

Join Hemi's Discord to connect with the community and submit questions ahead of next week's Midweek with Max, now streaming live on X, LinkedIn, and YouTube every Tuesday at 8 AM PDT / 11 AM EDT / 15:00 UTC.