Q: What headline did Satoshi Nakamoto embed in Bitcoin's genesis block, and why does it matter technically?

THORChain was drained of roughly $10.8 million across Bitcoin, Ethereum, BNB Smart Chain, and Base on Friday, prompting the protocol to halt all trading and signing operations. RUNE dropped 12% on the news and no post-mortem has been released. The attack adds to a catastrophic 2026 for crosschain infrastructure, which is the sector's most exploited category, now having seen over $2.8 billion in cumulative losses since 2021.

The Clarity Act cleared the Senate Banking Committee with bipartisan support, setting up a potential full Senate vote within weeks. The bill is the most significant attempt yet to define which digital assets fall under SEC vs. CFTC jurisdiction, a question that has left DeFi protocols in regulatory limbo for years. If it reaches the floor and passes, it would be the most consequential piece of U.S. crypto legislation since the GENIUS Act.

From Hong Kong to Miami, this year's conference circuit landed on a clear consensus: DeFi isn't fading, it's graduating. Bitwise reported receiving requests from regulated fintechs and neobanks seeking compliant DeFi exposure, while a16z's Guy Wuollet argued that AI agents will ultimately require financial rails that look "either literally DeFi or a lot like DeFi."

The Rust conversion from opgeth to opereth continued advancing this week, with significant progress and local net testing underway. An early alpha will be available for node operators to try in the next couple of weeks, with a specific date to be announced closer to launch. The opereth transition also directly enables ZK provability work, as full opereth compatibility allows large portions of the Hemi chain to be ZK proven using existing tools and ecosystems, with end-to-end ZK provability testing expected to begin in parallel with the testnet rollout.

New details emerged around the Oxygen Bitcoin indexer rollout within opereth. The first version of opereth will give node operators the option to run either Oxygen, Hemi's new ground-up Rust Bitcoin indexer built for ZK provability, or the existing TBC implementation. In a future network upgrade, TBC will be deprecated and operators will be required to switch to Oxygen. That mandatory transition is not expected for at least eight weeks, and the team will announce well in advance. Once the Oxygen upgrade is complete, it will enable network level ZK provability and unlock crosschain functions.

An updated PoP payout algorithm is shipping soon. The new algorithm is designed to handle extreme Bitcoin fee market swings, having been back-tested against historical fee market volatility. Rather than reading raw onchain fee data, the system targets a redundancy of five publications and dynamically adjusts incentives up or down based on how many publications are actually received.

Built on Hemi returns next Friday, with Hemi’s Marketing Director Jeremy Nation and Head of Growth Taylor Click, joined by BitFi cofounder Chelsea Zhang to discuss BitFi’s platform, the DeFi ecosystem, and more.

Streaming live on X, YouTube, and LinkedIn this May 22, at 12:00 PM PDT, 3 PM EDT, 7 PM UTC.

Hemi is building a programmable Bitcoin Layer 2 secured by a combination of Bitcoin Proof-of-Work and Ethereum Proof-of-Stake. At the center of its decentralization roadmap is veHEMI, a protocol-native staking system designed to align long-term participants with the network’s security, governance, and economic growth.

Learn more.

The Hemi Discord community, includes more than 111,700 members, and over 1,000 daily active users. This week the we launched our new community-focused YouTube channel, HemigoTV, which will be the new ground for community-focused content.

Watch HemigoTV's first videos here:

Community Reboot AMA

Teach Rick Crypto: Episode 1

While serving as a vibrant hub for the community, Hemi’s Discord is also where you can compete to win prizes in onchain games. Congratulations to all the winners who played last week. A snapshot was taken on May 11, 2026:

Here is the prize breakdown:

Top 3 : 15,000 $HEMI Tokens

• 1st place : 7,000 $HEMI

• 2nd place : 5,000 $HEMI

• 3rd place : 3,000 $HEMI

Join Hemi’s Discord to compete and win each week.

This week's Midweek with Max covered updates on the OpReth transition, MinerFi, ZK provability, and more.

Catch the full recap.

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

A: Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks," from The Times, January 3, 2009. While most people cite it as a political statement against the traditional banking system, it also functions as cryptographic proof that the genesis block couldn't have been mined before that date, making it an irrefutable timestamp disguised as a manifesto.