This Week:
-This Week’s Hemi Yield Opportunities
-Need to Know DeFi Ecosystem Shifts
-This Week in Hemi: Protocol Updates and More
-Community Spotlight
Hemi is proud to be partnered with BrownFi, with an integration through Algebra's CLAMM infrastructure and Merkl's incentives on APY/APR:
Provide liquidity to BrownFi WBTC-hemiBTC and earn up to 11.9%
Provide liquidity to BrownFi WETH-USDC.e and earn up to 38.8%
Provide liquidity to BrownFi USDC.e-VUSD and earn up to 43.64%
Provide liquidity to BrownFi hemiBTC-VUSD and earn up to 44.14%
Provide liquidity to BrownFi HEMI-VUSD and earn up to 260.95%.
Jurisdictional restrictions may apply.
APY/APR rates are subject to change with variable market conditions.
Learn more about the partnership.
SEC Proposes Regulation of Crypto Assets
On Tuesday Aug 18, the SEC unveiled its first major crypto rulemaking, a tailored framework Chair Paul Atkins says will "onshore innovation in crypto asset markets." Key pieces: a startup exemption letting projects raise up to $5M over four years without Securities Act registration, a $75M/12-month fundraising pathway with added disclosures, and a safe harbor under which a token can stop being a security once "managerial efforts" cease. The comment period runs 60 days. The move came as Congress stalls on the Clarity Act, with a procedural vote now penciled in for mid-September. The White House signaled it will keep pushing regulatory action if legislation doesn't land before the November midterms.
Crypto Markets Rally
BTC opened Friday at $73,013 (+5.4%) and pushed to roughly $77,300 by mid-morning. The rally accounts for BTC's strongest level in two months after sitting near $64K on Tuesday. Ethereum climbed toward $2,390 after jumping 10% Wednesday to reclaim the $2,000 level; Solana and XRP tacked on 5%+ daily gains. Three catalysts stacked up: the Treasury doubled longer-dated bond buybacks to at least $4B per operation starting September 9th, the SEC's Reg Crypto proposal landed Tuesday, and President Trump pushed the Clarity Act Thursday. The squeeze was violent — $1.92B liquidated in 24 hours, overwhelmingly shorts — and crypto equities ran too: Strategy and Bitmine gained ~10%, with Fold, BitGo, and American Bitcoin up 15–20%.
Genius Act Implementation Looms
On Monday Aug 17, Treasury issued the first core rule implementing the GENIUS Act, past its statutory deadline, covering payment stablecoin issuance, offer, and sale. Only permitted or qualified foreign issuers may issue stablecoins in the U.S., and service providers must drop unqualified issuers' coins by July 18, 2028. Foreign issuers, read: Tether, must register with the OCC, prove they can honor lawful freeze orders, and operate under a reciprocal home regime. Comments are due October 19, with a target effective date of January 18, 2027. Secretary Scott Bessent framed it as providing "the regulatory certainty businesses need to innovate and grow" while the Clarity Act stalls in Congress.
veHEMI Distribution: At the Finish Line
Last week we said it was landing; this week it's staged and ready to deploy: contract deployed, configured with old positions, and the apps team flips a switch on the UI. Important reassurance for stakers: the new distribution covers the entire period since the last one, so nobody has missed out on any rewards despite the delay.
ZK Marketplace: Why We Built Our Own
Max went deep on the ZK proving marketplace ahead of public testing in the next couple of weeks. In summary, Hemi controls it end to end, no third-party marketplace that can break upstream and take everything downstream with it. Also, it's composable onchain, so protocols can define proof validity by the statement it attests to and submit jobs directly from smart contracts, no centralized witness-serialization daemon as a single point of failure. Finally, it's multi-ZKVM. We want at least three ZKVMs for implementation diversity and redundancy against soundness bugs, and anyone can permissionlessly add support for new ones, with a governance process to mark them formally approved.
Engineering Updates
On the engineering front, the zkProveability OpReth Rust conversion keeps moving: end-to-end parity testing, end-to-end proving with RISC Zero (SP1 soon), and SnapSync backported from op-geth into op-reth, with Oxygen hooked in too, since its single state tree of Bitcoin data makes spinning up a node fast despite the heavy indexing. Upcoming investor/partner unlocks will all flow transparently onchain through the veHEMI system.
Hemi Arcade Game Contest Winners Are In!
The moment everyone was waiting for. Out of ten submissions, six winners across the categories. Most Original goes to Blind Life Simulator by Alex ("if nothing, it was extremely original"). Best On-Chain goes to Blockstep by Gnar, which uses Bitcoin blocks as the PRNG input to generate game randomness, the most interesting use of blockchain tech the team saw.
Most Fun ended in a three-way tie: Proof of Patience by Deaver (lovingly on-theme for Midweek with Max), Hemi Chess by possible.0xfat8 (with slick backend account abstraction so players never touch a wallet or pay gas), and Shadowrunner by Valtio.
The Community Award goes to Idle Kingdom by Alpha, where you can tap the screen to expand your kingdom’s borders.
Winners take home 10,000 HEMI tokens plus a special edition Hemi Arcade hoodie and mug, and in a magnanimous motion, every single participant who submitted gets 2,500 HEMI tokens and an Arcade t-shirt. More Arcade seasons are coming, with expanded categories. We’re always welcoming feedback too, so speak up in the Hemi Discord if you have comments or suggestions.
Join Hemi’s Discord and engage with the community.
Midweek with Max covers ongoing engineering, community, and marketing updates.
Join Hemi’s Discord to send questions for Max ahead of next week’s AMA.
Protocol Engineering Office Hours are now streaming on X, YouTube, and LinkedIn, every other Wednesday at 8:00 AM PDT, 11:00 AM EDT, and 15:00 UTC. Join the team next week on Wednesday, August 26th.
