In Today’s Issue:

• Need to Know DeFi Ecosystem Shifts

• This Week in Hemi: Protocol Highlights, New Partnerships, and More

• Community Spotlight

• This Week’s Hemi Yield Opportunities

Q: What prevents a miner from easily rewriting Bitcoin’s transaction history?

DeFi TVL Pullback Deepens as Market Activity Slows

DeFi total value locked has continued its downward trajectory, reflecting sustained deleveraging and reduced activity across borrowing, lending, and staking venues. According to DeFiLlama and market trackers, aggregate TVL has pulled back from earlier peaks, illustrating capital rotation and caution ahead of year-end.

Curve Finance Strengthens Fee Share Amid Sector Flux

Curve Finance has solidified its position as one of Ethereum’s dominant DEX venues by capturing roughly 44% of fee share in the DEX landscape, according to recent industry reporting. This emphasizes that fee-oriented, core-asset trading venues are gaining structural share even as speculative volatility softens. 

Traditional Finance Tests DeFi Tools at Scale

Russia’s largest bank, Sberbank, reported active testing of decentralized finance products as customer demand for crypto instruments grows. The move suggests that large financial institutions are increasingly exploring DeFi capabilities for trading and custody, potentially bridging tradfi and onchain liquidity pools.

Weekly DeFi Market Snapshot

• Total DeFi TVL: ~$115–130B (per DefiLlama)

• Stablecoin Supply: ~$300–315B (per DefiLlama stablecoins dashboard)

DeFi is closing the year in consolidation mode, with capital rotating away from speculative positions and toward durable, fee-based infrastructure as markets de-risk.

Protocol & Ecosystem Updates

V2 Cleanup and Network Stabilization

Following recent Fusaka and V2 upgrades, network stabilization work is nearing completion and preparations are underway for a formal V2 release.

HBUSD Experimental Primitive Previewed

Hemi is preparing an experimental protocol primitive, HBUSD, designed as a one-way conversion from HEMI into a USD-denominated asset. The initiative is intended as an exploratory economic mechanism accompanied by a community design competition with token and merchandise rewards.

Transition from Hemi Alliance to Ambassador Program

The Hemi Alliance program has formally concluded. Work is underway on a more structured Hemi Ambassador program, targeted for launch in early 2026.

hBitVM AMA Held in Hemi Discord

Max hosted a community AMA on December 19th in the Hemi Discord focused on hBitVM, addressing questions around the architecture, design goals, and upcoming technical milestones.

Hemi Partnerships

Hemi and Wert have teamed up, enabling fiat onramps for anyone to use debit and credit cards to get ETH, USDT, USDC, ecosystem tokens, and NFTs.

Read more.

With GlueX, Hemi users get a unified, low-fee swap asset routing tool via an embedded widget or directly through the GlueX dApp web interface.

Read more.

Beta-Testing Role and HBUSD Contest

We are happy to announce the beta-testing role being deployed to the Hemi Discord server. Any community member can apply for it, and if certain criteria is met, they will gain access to the exclusive beta tester channel where they can then be the first to test out new and innovative Hemi tech.

We also have the hbUSD NFT contest. The community can create original art that will then be transformed into the first soulbound hbUSD NFTs. Details can be found in the Hemi Discord announcements channel.

A: Proof-of-work, which makes altering past blocks computationally expensive.