Q: Who was a Bitcoin core developer in the early days and one of the first to publicly communicate updates from Satoshi Nakamoto to the broader community?

The ~$270M–$285M exploit of Drift Protocol was the defining DeFi event of the week, draining the majority of assets from its main vault and sending shockwaves across the Solana ecosystem. Onchain investigator ZachXBT publicly criticized Circle for delays in freezing stolen funds held in USDC, arguing that response times remain inconsistent despite the centralized control issuers retain.

Polymarket expanded its market coverage beyond crypto, adding exposure to equities, indices, and commodities through integrations with Pyth Network price feeds. Users will be able to take directional views on assets like stocks, gold, and oil from within a single onchain interface.

Crypto markets pulled back this week as macro conditions tightened, with geopolitical escalation and a stronger dollar driving a broader risk-off move. Assets tied closely to DeFi activity, including Ethereum and Solana, saw increased volatility alongside declining trader risk appetite. The Drift exploit compounded the effect, particularly within Solana’s ecosystem.

Development across Hemi’s core infrastructure continues to move toward public readiness. MinerFi is progressing through its final stages, with updates to the threshold signature system now complete and entering audit. Supporting components, including the continuum daemon and its onchain integrations, are being finalized to enable coordinated operation across the stack. Expect early access through the beta tester program as components move into integrated testing.

Work accellerates with the ZK proving marketplace, which is being integrated into live applications and positioned as a core primitive within the Hemi ecosystem. The marketplace is designed to make zero-knowledge functionality more accessible by allowing developers to define proofs based on outcomes rather than managing complex input pipelines. This reduces friction for building applications that rely on verifiable computation, whether for DeFi, interoperability, or offchain processing. While native to Hemi, the marketplace is designed to extend beyond a single network, enabling proofs generated within Hemi to be consumed across other chains.

veHEMI is evolving into a broader economic security layer, with ongoing work to support restaking and expanded participation in decentralized infrastructure. This shift enables staked positions to take on active roles within the network, including contributing to marketplace operations and, over time, governance. The direction here is to establish a system where economic weight directly supports network functionality, creating tighter alignment between participation, security, and long-term incentives.

This week the team provided protocol updates and addressed uncertaintly caused by Google’s quantum headlines.

Join Hemi’s Discord and catch each Midweek with Max episode live.

A live discussion with Hemi Co-Founder and CTO Max Sanchez and Marketing Director Jeremy Nation covering Zero Knowledge (ZK) proofs, community questions, and offering a look forward to the long-term vision of a Hemi-native ZK marketplace.

See the full stream.

A: Hemi Labs Co-Founder and CEO Jeff Garzik.