A hacker turned Ostium's own price-feed infrastructure against it this week, draining roughly $18M in USDC from the perpetuals protocol's Arbitrum vault. Rather than breaking the code, the attacker abused a registered PriceUpKeep forwarder to submit oracle reports with future-dated timestamps, making losing trades look profitable so the vault paid out; security firm Blockaid flagged it in real time. Ostium, which trades real-world assets at up to 200x leverage and had cleared over $50B in volume, is just the latest in a run of keeper- and oracle-based attacks, following a $6M drain from Summer.fi the week prior and a tokenized-stock exploit at Edel Finance.

ENS holders voted this week to install a fresh eight-member Security Council, restoring the emergency veto that guards the naming protocol before the prior council's mandate expires July 24. The move closes a month-long standoff: an earlier renewal cleared an offchain vote only to fail the binding onchain one after co-founder Nick Johnson, who controls roughly half of all delegated tokens (an estimated 3.26M ENS), voted it down, reigniting debate over whale power in token governance. The successor proposal keeps eight seats but raises the action threshold to five-of-eight signers.

The DTCC, the plumbing behind virtually every U.S. securities trade, clearing $4.7 quadrillion in 2025, launched a pilot Wednesday to test tokenized stocks, ETFs, and Treasuries with nearly 40 financial institutions, among them JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, Vanguard, and the NYSE. Rather than spin up a parallel crypto rail, the exercise runs blockchain-based assets through existing post-trade infrastructure, such as collateral management, repo, margin, asset transfers, with aims to prove "the old and the new can live together," per DTCC Digital Assets head Nadine Chakar, who is targeting a scalable launch as soon as October.

Oxygen is essentially finished, and the team is now testing optimizations for tricky "denial-of-service" style Bitcoin blocks that can be slow to index in the ZKVM. That work is being wired into op-reth, with the changes flowing downstream to op-alloy-evm and the internal fork of Kona, which lets engineers prove with systems like Kailua and OP Succinct (for RISC Zero and SP1).

A performance problem that's been holding back the ordinals indexer is now cracked. Some mainnet blocks were taking 10–20 seconds to index, a non-starter when hVM ticks every 12 seconds. After a redesign focused on minimizing disk I/O (the real bottleneck turned out to be database compaction during initial sync), indexing at tip is now consistently under 3 seconds. The PR is near production-ready and headed to testnet and mainnet soon.

Max gave a live demo of the ZK Proving Marketplace, which is getting closer to public beta. Expect it in the beta testers channel soon, with incentives for bug reports, feedback, and base participation rewards for actually running proofs in the system.

With Ethereum deprecating Sepolia and the upcoming Glamsterdam upgrade, there are some changes coming to Hemi's testnet setup. None of it blocks getting ordinals out for people to play with, but keep an eye out if you're building on testnet.

While serving as a vibrant hub for the community, Hemi’s Discord is also where you can earn from a $HEMI prize pool by competing in onchain games.

HAIRgames Season 6 is here: Gone Fishing!

Season 6 is here and the games are moving on from races and target practice to the zen of fishing. Welcome to Max Pro Fishing 2026! Think you've got what it takes to reel in the biggest fish and climb the leaderboard?

Compete to win from a prize pool of 30,000 $HEMI for the Top 15 Players. Same structure as Season 5, where every rank matters and every position counts. Rewards start at 6,000 $HEMI for 1st place, 4,000 for 2nd, and 3,000 for 3rd, then step down through 2,400 (4th), 2,200 (5th), 2,000 (6th), 1,700 (7th), 1,500 (8th), 1,300 (9th), and 1,200 (10th). Rounding out the leaderboard, 11th through 15th earn 1,000, 900, 800, 600, and 400 $HEMI respectively.

Reminder: NFT holders (Hemi FIRE Hatchlings & Hemi 1st Anniversary NFT) still benefit from the 1.25x score multiplier!

Play here: https://game.hairtoken.xyz/

Join Hemi’s Discord for your chance to win and become part of Hemi’s growing community.

Midweek with Max covers ongoing engineering, community, and marketing updates.

Catch the full recap.

Join Hemi’s Discord to send questions for Max ahead of next week’s AMA.

To become more widely accessible, Protocol Engineering Office Hours are shifting from Discord to streaming on X, YouTube, and LinkedIn, to be held every other Wednesday at 8:00 AM PDT, 11:00 AM EDT, and 15:00 UTC.

Watch the last session.