Midweek with Max: Proving the Stack and Expanding Bitcoin’s Design Space

This week’s episode focused heavily on core protocol progress, with major advances across MinerFi, zero-knowledge (ZK) systems, and hBitVM infrastructure. 

On the MinerFi side, the team is moving forward with ZK-verifiable threshold signature ceremonies, enabling participants to prove correct key generation and resharing directly onchain cryptographically. Meanwhile, ongoing work continues for peer-to-peer improvements and smart contract development, upgrades that collectively strengthen protocol decentralization and reliability.

In another example of significant progress on ZK provability for Bitcoin and the hBitVM state, the system now supports full end-to-end ZK proofs of hBitVM state transitions. New data structures enable richer Bitcoin analytics, including fee-rate trends and coin-days spent. These capabilities open the door for more advanced Bitcoin-native DeFi applications.

On the protocol upgrade front, planning is still underway for the upcoming Jovian hard fork. This release will introduce housekeeping improvements and additional hBitVM precompiles, including migrating certain precompile addresses higher to avoid future collisions with upstream EVM changes. Support will persist for existing addresses, but development using the updated address range is encouraged for the sake of future-proofing alongside Ethereum’s ongoing evolution.

Max also spoke on a skunkworks initiative that will become Hemi’s first L3. Much of the foundational work is already complete, including the derivation pipeline, a dedicated execution environment tailored to the L3’s purpose, and an end-to-end Rust implementation designed for straightforward ZK provability. More details are expected in the coming weeks as the project matures. 

In parallel, final testing is ongoing for the updated PoP payout algorithm, which dynamically targets optimal publication behavior. With audits complete and results positive, deployment to mainnet is expected shortly, pending final validation.

Wrapping the show, several ecosystem and token updates were covered. A new veHEMI rewards distribution has gone live, spanning from October 31, 2025, to February 5, 2026. Eligible users can now claim rewards via the portal.

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