Hemi Labs, the new project from Bitcoin pioneer Jeff Garzik, and Maxwell Sanchez, co-founder of VeriBlock, announced the launch of Hemi Labs and its new project, Hemi Network, during the first day of Bitcoin Nashville. The testnet for the Hemi network will go live on Wednesday, the company said.
According to Hemi Labs, the Hemi Network is a modular layer-2 blockchain network built for superior scalability, security, and interoperability between Bitcoin and Ethereum. The Hemi Network uses a ‘Proof-of-Proof’ (PoP) consensus, Hemi Labs explains, which improves security on the Bitcoin blockchain and improves interoperability between it and the Ethereum network.
“PoP introduces a new form of miner – a PoP Miner – that periodically collects consensus information from Hemi and publishes it to Bitcoin in exchange for a mining reward paid by the protocol,” Sanchez shared. Declutter.
In addition to his duties as co-founder, Sanchez also serves as chief architect at Hemi Labs.
“The protocol uses these state publications to determine Hemi’s canonical chain, which means that attacking chains must be published in lock-step to Bitcoin, which would be observed by all network participants,” said Sanchez.
📄🍪 – Want one? Follow us at @TheBitcoinConf!
Ingredients: Bitcoin, Ethereum, flour, sugar, water…@BitcoinMagazine pic.twitter.com/6b3UVXZKpK
— Hemi Network (@hemi_xyz) July 23, 2024
“One of the questions we asked ourselves while designing and building Hemi was, ‘What do we want as developers that we don’t currently have, even given the current energy and innovation in the layer-2 space? Hemi Labs Jeff Garzik narrated Declutter in a statement. “This quickly led to explorations into better ways to access BTC data and make it more useful.”
Garzik explained by wrapping an Ethereum Virtual Machine around a BTC node, the Hemi Virtual Machine (hVM) gives developers the best possible insight into both chains.
“The Hemi Bitcoin Kit (hBK) takes that work and makes it available to all developers today who are asking the same questions we are,” he added.
To achieve this, Hemi Labs uses a version of Ethereum Virtual Machines (EVM) called Hemi Virtual Machines (hVM).
“To ensure full EVM compatibility, we designed hVM by adding new “precompiles” that allow smart contracts to communicate with the embedded Bitcoin node,” Sanchez explains. “Unless a dApp is specifically designed to interact with these precompiles, their code will run exactly as it would on any other EVM.”
Sanchez explained that developers who want to use hVM’s “Bitcoin Awareness” can call the precompiles directly or use the Hemi Bitcoin Kit (hBK), which simplifies the process by addressing the complexity of these interactions.
“Building Bitcoin-aware dApps requires a reliable source of Bitcoin data that smart contracts can access,” said Sanchez. “For almost a decade, Ethereum has hosted several Bitcoin header relay systems, which allow contracts to verify that a specific transaction relayed by a third party exists on Bitcoin. But there is a lot more going on with Bitcoin than what this evidence can verify.”
Edited by Stacy Elliott.