Written by: 1912212.eth, Foresight News
Although the market once questioned the excessive infrastructure, venture capital still insisted on its judgment and continued to bet.
New players in the L2 track are still eager to try. Recently, Hemi Labs, a team founded by legendary Bitcoin developer Jeff Garzik, has completed a $15 million financing round. This round of financing was jointly led by Binance Labs, Breyer Capital and Big Brain Holdings, and Crypto.com, Jihan Wu and others participated in the investment. The financing funds will be used to develop and launch the L2 network Hemi Network based on Bitcoin and Ethereum.
The L2 track is not only full of stars but also generally has average cyclical performance. Why did Hemi gain the support of a number of VCs?
What is Hemi?
Hemi is a modular L2 that enables scalability, security, and interoperability. Unlike other L2 protocols, which usually only do Bitcoin L2 or Ethereum L2 and focus on one ecosystem, Hemi treats Bitcoin and Ethereum as components of a single super network, thereby unlocking more potential for programmability, portability, etc.
The core of Hemi is its virtual machine, which integrates a complete Bitcoin node onto the Ethereum virtual machine. Coupled with its Bitcoin toolkit, it makes it easier for its developers to build smart contracts that interact with Bitcoin and Ethereum.
How does it work?
Hemi runs as Ethereum L2, protected by Bitcoin's PoW. So far, up to $2.8 billion has been lost in DeFi cross-chain bridge hacks. Hemi's miners publish network data to Bitcoin, and once confirmed by the Bitcoin network, the data gains the same security as Bitcoin itself. This enables it to have transactions protected by Bitcoin's PoW.
In order to further optimize the network optimization and security, Hemi adopts a professional node architecture, mainly including Bitcoin deterministic regulator, Bitcoin security sequencer, as well as PoP miners and verification challengers.
After the miners package and verify the transactions, the verification challengers monitor and verify the correctness of the transactions and state proofs, and finally confirm them on the Bitcoin network.
Core Consensus PoP
Currently, most blockchain protocols are PoW and PoS. Although most PoS public chains work well, there are still two major risks in this system.
One is “weak subjectivity”, where an attacker can accumulate old PoS miner keys to gain majority control at some point in the past, thus creating an alternative chain.
The second is censorship. An attacker with a majority of voting rights may reject or ignore certain transactions, thereby gaining control and undermining the decentralization and fairness of the network.
PoS networks lack protocol-level defenses against the above attacks. Hemi inherits the security of Bitcoin while maintaining the flexibility of Ethereum through a mechanism called Proof of Proof (PoP). Its operation is designed so that Hemi deploys specialized miners, namely PoP miners, to be responsible for
Key network details are collected and published on Bitcoin, tying Hemi’s security directly to Bitcoin’s established systems.
Use complex algorithms to generate proofs that are critical to cybersecurity.
The security of Bitcoin is used to ensure the integrity of the Hemi network, providing double protection.
Integration with Bitcoin provides Hemi with an additional layer of security, leveraging Bitcoin’s PoW (Proof of Work) system as the basis for resolving disputes and ensuring trustworthiness.
In addition, new blocks in the Hemi chain will receive confirmation from the Bitcoin network, making potential attacks more difficult.
Through Tunnels, Hemi also provides a Bitcoin-secured conduit for securely moving assets between chains. Hemi enables multiple methods of transferring assets between networks, beyond just the traditional methods and trust models provided by traditional bridges.
Hemi offers advanced features for asset programmability, including on-chain routing, which allows users to program and automate multi-step transactions with the ability to call or reroute transactions in the event of errors.
In summary, the PoP consensus mechanism allows miners to indirectly protect Hemi without participating in Hemi's consensus process, expands the transaction throughput in the Hemi ecosystem, and raises the attack threshold for network reorganization, etc., which not only enhances its security but also brings new functions to the protocol.
Team members
Hemi Labs was co-founded by early Bitcoin developer Jeff Garzik and blockchain security pioneer Max Sanchez. Jeff Garzik worked with Satoshi Nakamoto and has long been a core figure in the development and commercialization of open source software for Bitcoin technology. He served as a Bitcoin core developer for 5 years. It is worth mentioning that Jeff has a series of episodes on YouTube specifically recalling the early stories of Bitcoin and Satoshi Nakamoto.
He also worked at Red Hat for ten years and served on the board of directors of the Linux Foundation.
Jeff is not only the co-founder of Hemi, but also the co-founder and CEO of Bloq. Founded in 2016, Bloq is a blockchain solutions provider that includes an open source development pilot center and is a member of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance.
Maxwell is the co-founder and CTO. He co-created the Proof of proof (PoP) protocol and led the design of a new protocol optimized for PoP. In addition, he also launched the first test network using post-quantum cryptography and open source GPU miner software, discovered and disclosed vulnerabilities in multiple protocols, etc. He has rich technical strength and experience.
Currently, the entrepreneurial team has nearly 30 members, most of whom are experienced development engineers.
Testnet
Hemi Network launched the incentive testnet in July this year, where ordinary users can earn points by inviting and sharing links. After the invited user enters the platform, the inviter will receive 10% of the invited user's accumulated points.
Participate in various official tasks (such as on-chain interactions) to gain points and rankings. The system panel will update the data ranking information every 4 hours. In addition to gaining points for on-chain participation, social platforms and community participation contributions that have contributed to network growth will also gain corresponding points.
Currently, the test network incentives are in the first season, and there will be second and third season incentive activities in the future.
Hemi will be launched on the mainnet in the fourth quarter of this year.
