Q: What was the original block time Ethereum was designed for?

Britain this week became the first country to apply banking-style sanctions to a crypto exchange, designating HTX, formerly Huobi, under Regulation 17A for allegedly helping Russia circumvent international sanctions. UK financial firms are now required to freeze HTX-linked funds and trace transactions. The same sweep hit the A7A5 ruble stablecoin issuer. HTX, associated with Tron founder Justin Sun, insists the sanctioned entity, Huobi Global S.A., is legally distinct from the exchange itself, but Protos reported the separation doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

A compromised deployer key on Arbitrum let an attacker mint roughly 5.4 trillion vsdCRV tokens on Stake DAO this week. In theory, a devastating exploit. In practice: the attacker netted just $91,000. The protocol's own thin liquidity was its accidental defense; there simply wasn't enough depth to offload the minted tokens at any meaningful price. The breach itself arrived days after OpenZeppelin co-founder Manuel Aráoz publicly warned that he considers all of DeFi unsafe as AI tools make exploits faster and cheaper to execute.

Against a backdrop of drawback in DEX volume, Circle minted another $250 million USDC on Ethereum, a sign that institutional demand for onchain dollar liquidity hasn't followed the retail exodus. The mint adds to a broader picture: stablecoin supply keeps growing even as speculative trading dries up. More than $150 billion in U.S. Treasuries now backs stablecoin issuance globally.

Hemi's migration from opGeth to OpReth is progressing, with active testing and fuzzing underway. The initial rollout will use a version of OpReth that runs TBC under the hood, allowing existing OpGeth node operators to reuse their TBC index data directories. A future hard fork will then transition to Oxygen as the required indexer, which enables the ZK proving functionality the team is building toward.

The original hemiBTC staking beta is being replaced with a new version of Hemi Earn currently in internal testing. The updated model introduces a new staking mechanism that moves hemiBTC to Ethereum for improved yield. Existing beta testers won't earn APY on current positions but will receive HEMI tokens for their participation.

Internal testing of the ZK proving marketplace is ongoing, with a limited public alpha expected within the next couple of weeks. Those interested in early access are encouraged to join the beta testers channel in Discord.

The Hemi Engineering team joined for another AMA this week, to take on community questions with a deep dive on the hBitVM, Hemi's upcoming ZK-based Bitcoin tunneling protocol and the mechanism by which native BTC is locked on Bitcoin to mint hemiBTC, an ERC-20 representation usable across the Hemi network.

See the entire talk.

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. Following the first session, we have significantly strengthened our security measures to ensure a fair competition for everyone. In case of any doubt about a participant, we reserve the right to exclude them from the contest.

Join Hemi’s Discord to see if you can win a share of the prize pool.

This week’s episode of Midweek with Max kicked off with the usual engineering updates, with progress on the opGeth-to-opReth transition, which is currently in testing and fuzzing.

Catch the full recap.

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

Building something cool? Need help? Join Hemi’s Engineering Team’s in Discord for Office Hours. These Q&A sessions shift to accommodate those in other timezones. The next one is set for next week on Wednesday at 8AM PDT, 11 AM EDT, 15:00 UTC.

A: Ethereum’s original block time was set to 12 seconds, which is why it was considered revolutionary compared to Bitcoin's 10 minutes.