Q: When was the Bitcoin network successfully hacked?

The Kelp DAO exploit on April 18 continues to dominate DeFi this week, with losses now widely reported around ~$290M, though roughly $200M–$260M (approaching ~70–90%) has been frozen, contained, or made recoverable through coordinated protocol and governance actions. Investigations confirm the attack stemmed from compromised offchain infrastructure and a single-verifier LayerZero configuration, rather than a smart contract vulnerability. Attribution discussions increasingly point toward DPRK-linked actors, and the exploit is being framed as a cross-protocol contagion event rather than an isolated failure.

South Africa introduced new capital flow regulations this week that formally classify crypto assets as controlled capital, bringing them under the same framework as foreign currency. The rules require disclosure of holdings, approvals for crossborder transfers, and grant authorities the power to seize undeclared assets. The policy direction signals a clear shift toward state-supervised crypto movement, which could significantly limit participation in permissionless DeFi and push activity toward regulated intermediaries.

Tether’s freeze of $344 million in USDT on April 23 has quickly escalated into a geopolitical DeFi flashpoint, now directly linked to the U.S. Treasury’s broader “Economic Fury” campaign targeting Iran’s financial networks. The stablecoin issuer blacklisted two Tron-based wallets in coordination with the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) and U.S. law enforcement after investigators identified the funds as tied to sanctions evasion and illicit activity. The freeze was part of a wider sanctions push that includes targeting oil flows, shipping networks, and financial infrastructure tied to the Iranian regime.

Hemi’s transition from opgeth to opereth continues to move forward, with internal testing beginning this week and a phased rollout planned across infrastructure and external node operators. A beta release will allow operators to test configurations ahead of a full migration, with opgeth set for deprecation before the next Ethereum upgrade. Initial versions will continue using existing TBC data, with a later shift to Oxygen enabling ZK-based functionality and requiring a full reindex.

Development across the MinerFi system is advancing, expanding beyond a bridge into a full Bitcoin onboarding and DeFi composability layer. Work is nearing completion on Continuum, which coordinates threshold signature schemes for decentralized Bitcoin transaction signing, while ZK proving optimizations are reducing hardware requirements for participation.

Updates to veHEMI have been submitted for audit, introducing improved position tracking and compatibility with third-party governance platforms. In parallel, development continues on veHEMI restaking, which will extend its role into protocol security across systems like MinerFi, sequencing, and data availability, positioning it as a core coordination layer for the network.  

Hemitrap is a feature that forks the network for the testing of various smart contracts to ensure any changes result in secure deployments.

Read more.

Governance, restaking, and what the industry got wrong about vote-escrow tokenomics.

Read more.

This week the Hemi team met live to discuss ongoing network developments and answer community questions.

Watch the full stream.

Midweek with Max returned with updates on Hemi’s core engineering initiatives.

Catch the full recap.

After next week the show will transition to a direct streaming across X, YouTube, and LinkedIn. Join Hemi’s Discord to catch the final broadcast before the switch to a wider streaming format.

Join Hemi’s Jeremy Nation and Lagoon Finance Co-Founder COO Nadia Thura, live on the next Built on Hemi, streaming on Thursday, April 30 at 12PM PDT, 3PM EDT, on X, YouTube, and LinkedIn.

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A: Never. No successful hack of Bitcoin’s consensus has ever occurred.