Q: What was the initial Bitcoin block reward?

Bitcoin rebounded from roughly $63K to near $73K during the week as spot ETF inflows accelerated. Rising prices often improve collateral conditions across DeFi lending markets and increase liquidity for leveraged trading strategies.

Security researchers are warning about a spike in address-poisoning attacks, where scammers send small transactions from look-alike wallet addresses to trick users into copying fraudulent addresses from their transaction history. One well-known crypto influencer lost roughly $24 million in assets after falling victim to an address-poisoning attack targeting DeFi users interacting with stablecoin pools and liquidity strategies

Tensions inside the Aave DAO escalated this week after the Aave Chan Initiative announced it will wind down operations over the next four months. Aave secures secures approximately $27.2 billion to $36.5 billion in TVL, with a cumulative protocol lifetime lending volume recently exceeding $1 billion as of late February 2026.

Engineering work on MinerFi, Hemi’s fast tunneling system for Bitcoin assets, is nearing completion. The team is finalizing end-to-end testing and preparing to send components out for external security audits within the next one to two weeks.

Hemi’s original ZK incentive program is being upgraded into a general-purpose ZK proving marketplace. The system will allow the protocol itself to bid for the proofs it requires while also enabling external developers and chains to purchase ZK proof computation through the same marketplace.

Several ZK-related repositories are being released publicly, including optimized forks of ZK-VM implementations with AMD GPU support and performance improvements. The team also plans to open source Oxygen, Hemi’s ZK-proven Bitcoin indexer.

Feather provides Hemi users a fast, transparent front end to Morpho’s onchain lending ecosystem.

Read more.

Hemi’s Zero-Knowledge integrations will offer validation and coordination without collapsing privacy into surveillance.

Read more.

The Hemigo of the Week award that celebrates outstanding members of the Hemi community is moving to a monthly drawing to become Hemigo of the Month. Special congratulations go out to this week’s award winner: BROKEN.

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

This Hemi Engineering AMA gave the team a chance to answer community questions about how Zero-Knowledge (ZK) tech is being applied across the Hemi stack, including its role in crosschain provability, Bitcoin-secured infrastructure, and the future of decentralized compute systems.

See the full AMA.

A: The original block reward was 50 BTC, which remained in place until the first halving in 2012.