What Awaits Bitcoin? Chat with Jeff Garzik and Max Sanchez
11 Apr 2025 · 1:08:28
The Rollup talks with Jeff Garzik and Max Sanchez, co-founders of Hemi, about the case for Bitcoin's next institutional wave. They explain how Hemi embeds a full Bitcoin node into the EVM to combine Bitcoin's security with Ethereum's programmability, walking through its Bitcoin tunneling system for moving assets between chains, its recent mainnet launch, and why they expect nation states to follow institutions into Bitcoin.
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Being able to do more with your Bitcoin, but still being close to those L1 networks is the key. Whenever you look at asset transfers through the ecosystem and interoperability, you're only as secure as your weakest link. Where we at with the institutions, where we at with Bitcoin as an asset and the network. Welcome back to the rollup, your home for technical talks and open conversations that shape the modular future. Nothing on today's show is to be construed as financial advice. You can see our full disclosures list at therollup.co/ventures. Sit back, relax, and enjoy today's episode after a quick word from some of our awesome partners.
Redstone is DeFi's modular oracle. Supporting over 100 clients on over 50 chains, offering 1,000 assets. Redstone is the leader for Bitcoin staking and yieldbearing assets. They offer the most robust customizable price feeds available in any model. Join the Redstone exhibition [Music] today. What's going on, guys? Welcome back to the rollup. Today's episode is around the infamous Bitcoin scaling subject, which has gone through its first cycle in my view. In my view, we we we had a really interesting time last year, summer through fall, where we kind
of had this uh rise of Bitcoin scaling solutions. We actually did a Bitcoin and beyond program. Some of you guys watch that. Uh, Hemier was not a part of that, but they are scaling Bitcoin. And we have Jeff here today. We have Max as well. Guys, great to have you on. Welcome back. Likewise. Great to be here. Thanks for having us. Yes, sir. Well, Max, it's your first time. Jeff's been been on once or twice before. Would love to get a quick intro about yourself. Uh, how you met Jeff actually because you look like a bright maybe 25year-old computer science guy and Jeff is definitely more of an OG. and then kind of what your what your background is and what you do at him. Yeah, for sure. So, uh got into crypto late 2011, early 2012. So, I was still in high
school and learned about Bitcoin. I always loved economics, computer science and so that kind of merged the two together naturally. So got into it, started uh you know reading through the forums and the white paper and trying to understand what this technology is and what it could really do and uh eventually started a project called Curecoin which was basically trying to replace Bitcoin's proof of work with protein folding. And through doing that I realized why it's so important to have proof of work that doesn't do anything useful outside of securing the system. And so I think a lot of people coming into Bitcoin at first, at least back in the day, they go, "Oh, Bitcoin's great, but we have this wasteful proof of work thing. We got to get rid of that." And so that was my my own personal journey through uh coming to terms with how
amazing proof of work is and why proof of work is, you know, quoteunquote wasteful and Bitcoin is actually really valuable. Uh so then my next project, I co-founded a company uh called VeraBlock where we were trying to secure blockchains with Bitcoin with a new consensus protocol we created called proof of proof. And uh that's actually where I met Jeff and he was the through his parent company through through the company co-founded Block. Uh he was I believe the first investor Block was the first investor in Verarblock and so that's how we met way back in I want to say late 16 it might have been early 17 but I'm going to go with 16. And uh so yeah just kind of it's last eight years have been we we were working on that company for quite a while and then
eventually uh that just it didn't really get to market. It didn't make sense. We were trying to secure like all these tail chains and all the old like you know Bitcoin forks and there wasn't really market for it by the time we had the tech ready and so we took uh some of the tech from there and rolled that into what is now Hemi and then added a bunch of other cool new innovative stuff we've created over the last two years. So that's that's the quick rundown. Awesome. Um yeah, I mean the the that 2017 era was particularly interesting and and then I mean we Robbie and I weren't around in 2015 uh and or or or before. So we've kind of like we've kind of lost our like I've done a full circle where I was like Bitcoin oriented. I think Bitcoin's great. left Bitcoin, did
the ETH, did the trading, did the, you know, now came back to be like, ah man, I just keep coming back to Bitcoin and and so I think in in institutions are coming back in a big way too now. uh which has been interesting to see digital assets summit last week was particularly telling I think um it's a bit of a paradox there with the bitcoins and and or bitcoin and the institutions and kind of the ETFs and jeeoff I think that we spoke about this last time but honestly Jeeoff just before we get into hemi and all the all the intricacies I'm curious from your perspective what is the state of of bitcoin as an investable investable vehicle today and I'll just kind of give my my brief context I feel like our career risk in the space for running this media company and fund has
been almost neutralized in the last three months with the with the legislations with the institutions wanting BTC. I don't see Bitcoin dipping more than 50% in a given downturn ex except an extended bare market anytime soon. But of course, your perspective might be different. Where are we at with the institutions? Where we at with Bitcoin as an asset and the network? Um, and am I right to think that, uh, the career risk of working in crypto is more neutralized than ever or is there more pain coming for for those in crypto?
Well, uh, for I think Bitcoin is definitely a standout and the past three months have advanced that thesis uh, even more. Um, the US regulatory risk has gone way down for Bitcoin specifically versus the other cryptos. And not to get uh too deep into politics, but uh it applies uh cryptowide uh the past US administration, the Biden administration was literally creating an anti-crypto army with Senator Elizabeth Warren and others. uh you know just definitionally uh it's on the label anti-crypto and the new administration is very pro- crypto.
So they've uh dropped a lot of lawsuits from the SEC against Coinbase and Ripple and others. Um definitely going with a excuse me far more crypto uh centric crypto pro approach which is very refreshing. uh for a long time companies have been saying you know okay we want to work with the US government how do we register how do we come in and work with you guys and finally they're creating a path to that so that's uh that's good for crypto in general and now to Bitcoin specifically uh there was uh a little bit of uh amusing white house drama a week or two
ago uh they're building uh a strategic Bitcoin reserve. It started out as like XRP and so and a bunch of other uh tokens were announced and uh Trump tweeted, "Oh, by the way, Bitcoin and Ethereum, too." So, that was kind of the rough draft stage. What came out of that was strategic Bitcoin reserve. It was Bitcoin and only Bitcoin. And then uh a week after that they came out uh and said uh proof of work uh the US government said is definitely not a security. So created even more regulatory clarity but only for proofof work related network. So it was uh very
much in this past 30 days this is kind of breaking news as we record this. it was very pro- Bitcoin specifically and uh that's part of the hemithesis is uh we think people are coming back to Bitcoin and so that's uh you know selfishly that's that's definitely music for our years I think uh you know like I said crypto itself um is kind of in uh heading towards another alt season would if you want uh some of my trading and price predictions I try not to do too much price talk, but uh it feels like uh the temperature for Bitcoin has been turned up quite a bit.
The uh uh again on the regulatory side, ETFs uh fully legal, fully blessed and as much as crypto is a global technology, Bitcoin is a global technology. Uh I'm a US citizen and uh a lot of US crypto people uh uh they depend on how the regulatory winds eb and flow and so far it's uh definitely flowing in the right direction especially for Bitcoin.
Yeah. Anything to add there Max? No, not really. It's uh I remember getting into crypto early in the early days and Jeff even you know before that probably remembers all the regulatory uncertainty and you know the fear that just for mining bitcoin the government's going to you know knock down your door and steal your hard drive. So it's uh remembering remembering back to that now seeing you know strategic US government crypto reserve or bitcoin reserve now uh all the clarity around proof of work. It's uh it's exciting and I think you know a decade ago everyone would have said yeah you're crazy the government's never going to you know hold Bitcoin and declare proof of work is you know this amazing technology and it's not a security so it's super cool to see.
Yep. Yeah. I think that's the that's the big part on the legal side for for the asset and then for the networks. It just feels like um it feels like there's a strong shift towards uh seeking networks with value, learning about their how they work, trying to allocate time and energy. So, one thing that I've kind of been battling with last thing here on this kind of like socopolitical spectrum before we kind of get into more of Hemi and the tech and whatnot is like part of the reason why I got into crypto was one is verifiability. He was like, I saw this saw this this meme today from an OG guy and he was like, uh, Bitcoin's last audit was 10 minutes ago. The Federal Reserve's last audit was 51 years ago or
something like that, right? And so like part like that auditability, that verifiability to me was was was very very appealing. And then that naturally kind of leads you down into more of like this libertarian arc, more of like this decentralized a lot of the things. And it does feel like a lot of I put out a tweet I was like new BD in crypto is going to lobby your politicians and your institutions. So like how does one wrap their mind around the the core ethos of what we're trying to achieve here which ultimately if done correctly I think and I think a lot of the OG Bitcoiners believe there's a lot of like replacements and like usurpions to be had. Now I I I kind of have more bit more more of an optimistic approach
towards this collaborative endgame. But like how do we approach pandering to institutions and government for them to buy our bags, participate in our networks, learn about what is happening versus this idea of why we're even here in the first place. And a lot of it is kind of to build up against or in as a evolution of the of the systems and processes that have been built by those who we are now welcoming into our world. Uh Jeff maybe you can take us here. Yeah, I think it's fundamentally uh you know crypto is about uh the technology is about censorship resistance. The uh you know it's very self-s sovereign.
It's about uh personal empowerment, personal privacy. It's a it's a global technology. It's not a US technology. Uh and I think all of that has remained unchanged. the uh the the cryptomax maximalist uh approach would say that institutions are inevitable and so you got to figure out how to welcome the institutions, the governments as well as the the smaller companies, the individuals. How do we uh work together in you know this one world that we're all uh stuffed in uh called planet earth? And I think that once Bitcoin hits a certain level, which it
has already hit, then you're going to be playing in the big leagues. So, we're playing in the big leagues. And there there are no nice and pretty answers of uh we, you know, we're going to create a crypto for everybody but George Soros, right? You know, it's crypto technology just kind of doesn't work for uh to single out, you know, everybody but George uh kind of uh nature. It's global. It's uh, you know, very uh level playing field type of technology, which is really why crypto appeals in part. I think it's pro- freedom. And so I'm I'm just ultimately happy that crypto is getting adopted by
governments because that naturally leans him to be more pro- freedom, uh, you know, more about empowering their citizens. So from that perspective, I think it's a it's a net win. Uh on the institution side, I think they move very slowly. I was uh just at a a large uh investment summit with uh at Michael Sailor's house down in uh Miami and uh it was all uh institutions, hedge funds, large investors, and they're just now thinking about custody. And now that uh SAB 121 uh has been yanked and SAB 122 is uh the you know the preferred regulatory
landscape which is about uh putting crypto on your books as uh banks and banking and the shoots and ladders that institutions uh depend on. Those shoots and ladders in turn have to be fully regulatory compliant and that sort of thing. So getting regulated custodians, excuse me, I got a some bit of a summer cold here. Regulated custodians is, you know, the baby step that uh institutions are taking to maybe onboard some crypto onto their balance sheet. Um there are others. Uh there are new special specialist types of hedge
funds called liquid funds which are newly investing in crypto. Uh specifically uh the shoots and ladders of DeFi like earning yield things of that nature. And so uh they'll go one hop over to a liquid fund and then the liquid fund will hop into crypto. And so there there are a number of those like one hop removed touching crypto type investments that uh are another baby step that institutions are heading into. But ultimately institutions are uh just like everyone else they're welcome on open permissionless networks. I'd say we just have to guard against uh just like in the real world outside of crypto
institutional capture because you don't want uh you know any government any corporation or uh you know set of control measures to capture Bitcoin or the other cryptos. Yeah. And luckily the networks were built in such a way that is Byzantine fault tolerant and they've gotten to a substantial size. What I'm more what what like what I think is going to happen is more of like this funniest outcome is the most likely like there's 100% going to be nation states in this upcoming like I think institutions drive like the first part of this run here that's upcoming I believe for Bitcoin but I think like I think we're going to get nation states fomoing at suboptimal
times and we are going to have nation state community members here and it's going to be very very like like 2017 I remember on crypto Twitter is always Oh, the institutions are coming. The institutions are coming. It's like, no, they're actually here now. Took seven years. Um, you know, I think like the next legs for Bitcoin are going to be dominated by nation states and we we'll be saying countries are coming, countries are coming. So, that's going to be interesting time. Um, but yeah, I was just curious on your opinion about kind of how to balance these these different perspectives because we found ourselves in a spot where like I'm moving to New York City. There's like this there seems to be like this kind of like rush back to America. Robbie is trying to spend more time in DC. um he's probably more akin to to handle some of
the politicians and and I I just want to go interface with institutions in person and just educate them because I feel like they're actually open to it and I think that they want like for example Blockworks did such a good job with uh digital asset summit last week to where like Yano and Mike are now kind of interfacing with a lot of these institutions and I think that's what they need like they want unbiased trusted research education and honestly I think that a lot of these funds up there they want a reason to buy. Like I think we have to do a better job of giving them a reason to buy and to invest. And so I think like that's kind of what I'm trying to do next quarter or two in New York. Um I just feel like there's a large untapped market there.
But again like bringing the same principles in and I think that's something that we have to keep in mind as an industry. Like even everyone in the industry is excited about stable coins right now and and I and and I think it's awesome. It's great. But stable coins were just a representation of the of the previous system on chain. Like back in my day in 2020 on Ethereum, it was all about these algorithmic stable coins trying to figure out ways to create store value without having to have it be tied to a dollar, right? So, so there's things that I think that we need to bring into the upcoming future with us. Um, and it does feel like crypto's culture I is going a bit more kind of wide reaching and obviously less uh cipher punk, but I I think it's just
important to keep that to keep that Yeah, we got to got to keep that heritage uh alive because folks uh you know who are new to the industry, they they might not necessarily have gotten the same, you know, maybe this is a bad word, but onboarding that we did in 2010, 2011, 2012 of uh the early crypto [Music] cy cyber libertarian crypto anarchist kind of ethos brought into and I think open source ethos too actually I think open source is the big thing that they will be able to get behind and understand I don't think they can support like oh you know no government or something or oh like take down the fed or whatever right and I don't think that we support that but I think the
open source ethos they ought to get behind open source open network yep yep Well, cool. Um, all right, Max, let's talk a bit more about the tech, about Hemi, um, and and kind of where we're going. Um, congrats to the mainet, guys. Um, congrats on just everything going smoothly. I know how how crazy that can be. Maybe we should start there with a reflection from you guys of the time spent to launching mainet, how you how you're feeling about it. Um, did it go as expected? Do you guys lose a lot of sleep? And then what are you guys most focused on now as well?
You go first. Go for it. Uh so we've been we originally launched our public we've been working on this for probably two and a half years now. A solid two years hands- on keyboard IDE open kind of work. And uh so we did our test net back in July of last year, July of 24. And so we had a good, you know, seven, eight, nine months to bake the protocol, do testing. We had an amazing community show up who uh you know whether they were chasing points or just really interested in parts of the tech or whatever they were poking and proddding every single part of the system which was really cool really great from a you know a testing feedback iterative development perspective. Uh so that was super cool to see. Uh I think that you know kind of that baking period and
figuring out especially with some of the new stuff we're doing with Bitcoin interoperability uh our tunneling system what we call HVM the hemi virtual machine which I'm sure we'll talk more about you know later in this podcast uh but seeing people try out those different technologies and put them to the test and give not just feedback of you know hey this part's broken or you know is this a bug but uh you know some of the usability stuff like hey if I'm going to build an application that does this I'm going to need you know this piece and this piece and you know this thing responding in this way doesn't make as much sense as maybe structuring it like this. So a lot of good feedback both on the the you know hard you know bug fixes and improvements and then also the the softer you know what the product
looks like how people want to use it how people want to engage with it. Uh so I think all that led up to a successful mainet launch. We had uh just all that testing and feedback and work go into uh a final polish product that I'm really proud of uh getting out there and testing you know in the real world with real money. So super exciting to see uh the actual mainet launch went uh as smooth as it can. I think whenever you uh there's always the the last minute you know documentation updates and you know oh is you know this part still congruent with you know the tokconomics change whatever it is uh but I think the the team rallied together and figured all those out and yeah launch was smooth. The the
last what's it been uh 11 11 12 days since we launched have been uh it's cool to see the the adoption. I think we're at I have some stats up here. A little over 100,000 unique addresses, which obviously doesn't mean unique humans on a keyboard, but uh it's a good proxy metric. Uh a lot of transaction volume, a lot of people using the network. Uh a lot of people interacting with the new Bitcoin tunnel system, a lot of people using the more traditional L2 Ethereum style tunnel system. And yeah, it's uh we got a lot of TVL on chain. we are starting to get that moved over to actually being uh useful liquidity in protocols like you know DEX has lending
protocols that's cool to see kind of that second phase of okay you got all the assets on the network now let's put them somewhere where they're productive and you know can bring in users so yeah it's been uh overall very exciting it's been a your your question on sleep I think we're finally caught up on sleep again a week and a half Max underells it undersells himself he's been amazing his Uh this whole team has been amazing. We uh tested to the point where we melted down Bitcoin test net. We tested to the point where we melted down Ethereum test net. Uh the community uh even minted some uh free NFTts. Uh I broke Solia NFTts in honor of the event. Uh and
testing is in this industry even more important than other industries. I've all always talked about this as cry crypto as a lot like medical devices or aircraft software. It just can't fail. And you've got to stress test every line of code, every possible situation that you can think of. And I think that we uh did that in spades. So I'm I'm really proud of uh uh our team and what they've done. And thanks to that, the mainet launch went smoothly. Is uh as a a mostly former software engineer, I still do uh coding every now and then, but
lean very heavily on Mr. Max here. Uh you know, it's all about unit testing, fuzz testing, stress testing. There there are literally 10 different types of testing and we hit every single one of those. So my it warms my software engineering heart uh that we had the opportunity to do all the testing that we need. Sometimes in uh you know startups and product launches you just kind of have to shove things out the door the way that uh they are and uh it's a a real blessing to be able to be in a situation where you can wait to get it right and then push it out the door.
And that's what we did with Hemi. And uh I'm super pleased with how it turned out. There there was no drama on mainet launch day. There were no explosions on mainet launch day. And that's uh that's exactly what you want. Our our engineers have a saying of never launch on a Friday, which which makes sense because you don't want your uh your poor engineering team staying over the weekend to fix broken stuff. We launched on a Wednesday and things were were just so smooth that uh I was making sure that the guys uh could go home and get sleep. Yeah, it's awesome. Yeah, it's quite stressful when you're launching so many different things at once and then also the the deployment of all the
applications explorers all the infra and then all the users and then managing the community's expectations. So, um bravo guys and excited to to see things grow and develop. I kind of have a thesis where takes about nine to 12 months I think for a chain to really even get uh to a point where you know traction is going to happen. Um now obviously you know TVL and numbers are there and but really like for the ecosystem to de develop I tend to kind of give it that much time within 9 to 12 months you can pretty much tell I think like where this is going. Um and and so that kind of becomes a question for you guys is I have a I have a thesis that that we we see a lot more demand and development of
like purpose-built blockchain. So chains that are meant for a specific niche for a specific community or for are are technically crafted in a way to fulfill a specific use case. Hyperl's a good example, right? like quite a centralized validator set still kind of behind still some like weird things happening there but at the end of the day they optimize strictly for performance and UX and that's what they've delivered. Bitcoin is also like one of the OG purpose-built chains. Slow. It's It gets clogged up. It's expensive. But that's okay because there's so much mining power. There's so much at stake and it's so simple with no with very little execution on on the base layer that it's a perfect like
payments store value chain, right? It's like it it it may not be seen as that, but you know that that's like one analogy that I've been developing as well as you know something like hyperlquid kind of like two ends of the spectrum. Celestia also very purpose-built just for DA other chains, right? And so when you guys are thinking about Hemi from your community or for your niche or for your specific use case, how is this technology that you've built under the hood, how is that purpose built for the use case that you guys are trying to achieve today? I think it's uh the it's the back to Bitcoin thesis. Um the the world I think after many many years of uh dallying with alt L1s and stuff like that is
coming back to Bitcoin but you can't put all the coffees on the Bitcoin L1 main chain. So what is the what is the natural evolution after that? And similar uh similar with Ethereum, what uh what do you do when you like some of the liquidity value protocols on Ethereum, but the fees are too high is uh economics uh tells you that inevitably things are going to spill over to other chains. And I think that's that's kind of the uh marrying the king and queen of crypto is thesis. And I think we we're leaning into that back to Bitcoin, back to Ethereum type of
directionality. Um, you're absolutely right uh with, you know, I think in your description of Bitcoin and we embrace that. You know, we think that Hemi is very complimentary to that. So, you lean into Bitcoin strengths. It's absolutely bombproof. uh that it's the bell of the ball that you can say you can vote most likely to be here in a hundred years. You know, Bitcoin tops that list. Um but is it a little bit of a steam engine? Is it a little bit of a you know an older technology? Um I think is also yes. And I think you lean into its its strengths.
You lean into where Bitcoin stops. um we have we add a lot more programmability on top of Bitcoin to uh really lean into that on the technical side. But on the market, you know, what is the what are the killer apps? What are the killer apps that are coming? I think it's uh for us at Hemi at least a big portion not not the whole enchilada but a big portion is uh BTC what you can do with it uh yieldwise what you can do with it from uh mining pool payment flows going directly from mining pools straight into DeFi uh I'm a I'm a micro Bitcoin miner I can't brag about my exahashes but I have uh I have several ant miners and it
sure would be nice to have that not just dropped into my passive BTC wallet, which is the way F2 pool and the other pools work now, but uh make that go further. Drop that into a uh Bitcoin lending market where I am yielding, you know, two, three, 4% on my my Bitcoin or if I want more risk, dial it up and get into a a Pendle PT or something of this nature that's a little bit more speculative. But I think that uh being able to do more with your Bitcoin but still being close to those L1 networks is the key because beyond just you know you were talking about uh Bitcoin's use
cases I would add to your very short list of I think too uh settlement settlement uh that's where all the rollups are settling to either Bitcoin or Ethereum L1 all of the uh D5 protocols the bridges is their home is the L1 and you kind of get into the fast lane of an L2 to do, you know, a whole lot of your everyday stuff at very low fees. Uh you'll go where the liquidity is and then you'll kind of park back in the parking lot uh settling to uh ETH or Bitcoin L1 at the end of the day. Uh Max, uh do you have uh any similar thoughts? I think that all makes sense.
Uh I kind of look at Hemi as sort of an infrastructure play and so you're asking kind of like use cases and community and I see what we're doing is you know like Bitcoin was this base layer for amazing proof of work security finality uh you know very uh purpose-built for handling transfers being very simple very unlikely to have some weird bug somebody discovers and exploits uh obviously Ethereum's on the programmability side Ethereum's now with their you know L2 ccentric roll up roll up rollup centric road map uh looking at you know features they can add to the base layer like you know DA with EIP uh 4844 and features like that and I think hemi what we're really trying to do is bridge those two
together take the best parts of each of those and combine them into this cool new remix of Bitcoin proof of work plus Ethereum DA plus Ethereum programmability plus Bitcoin visibility and combine those in a way that's interesting unique adds value to both of those networks and acts as this infrastructure layer here where if you want to build an application across either one of those networks or across both of those networks, this is the best place to do it because we're giving you the most bare metal access to Bitcoin. We're giving you the most bare metal access to Ethereum and we're creating an ecosystem where you're not just limited to the hemi chain but in the future you can take all those features and use those on your own L3 that's uh some sort of you know app chain for your D app or
you know dedicated chain for your community and you can customize you know I know the the whole modularity narrative is way overplayed and no longer the meta but you know being able to uh swap out you know okay I need you know I can use proof of authority because it's gaming chain and people are moving around, you know, NFTTS worth 2 cents and I need really high throughput, but I still want access to Bitcoin Ethereum assets. Okay, that's one architecture of L3 that you could launch on Hemi or I need something super secure. We need our own native Ethereum style proof of stake. uh but I also get Bitcoin security and so maybe I can uh you know experiment with other sorts of you know finality mechanisms and I can use a livveness preserving uh consensus protocol instead of a security optimized
one that can never fork and so you get all these different interesting geometries of what you can do now that you have access to Bitcoin both security and assets access to Ethereum both DA and assets and then how do you remix those in interesting ways that serve different use cases. Yep. Yeah, I think um regardless what Jeff was saying about uh kind of you can't fight gravity, we have to scale horizontally. That's that's like part of the hemithesis and then the other part is really just yeah bringing back to to Bitcoin and giving people this optionality. Max and providing a tool set for developers and then also for users to to be able to kind of do what they want to do. So let's go a bit more under the hood then. Max, talk to us about um why don't we start with the
bridge construction because I think that I think that that's a hot topic in the Bitcoin scaling space. Um obviously there's bit there's a lot of progress happening on BitM. Um I think that's all the way up to like 2.5 depending on how you count it these days. Um and then of course a lot of teams working on trust minimized Bitcoin bridging between L1 and and L2. So what was the um construction that you guys chose and how are you navigating the trade-offs of that construction? Innovating finance global institutional and onchain deep liquidity to drive capital efficiency.
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the best in the business, the Biddle Fund by Black Rockck and Superstate. This is stable coin season. It is the yieldbearing stable coin by Fracks, coming soon to a chain near you. Yeah, great question. And I'll uh I'll give kind of the the two-minute background on why Bitcoin settlement so hard first that kind of set the stage for uh our design and then one of the future designs that we're working on that kind of combines some interesting ideas in the space. Uh so right now when you build an L2 on Ethereum settlement's not easy but it's a solved problem in that you have this turncomplete language. You can write any kind of arbitrary settlement logic you want. You know you have programmability of assets. you're able to say, "Hey, all these ERC20s and
ETH that got deposited the L2, those are going to sit in this contract with uh you know, these flows for assets in and out and when they come out, they have to you have to have a you know, withdrawal receipt and the proof and then you have this challenge period or you have ZK proof and all that can be done and programmed in Ethereum." And so it's it's not easy, but it's a solved problem. We know how to do it. We know how to do it very securely. on the Bitcoin side, Bitcoin's lack of uh programmability, the lack of flexibility, it makes you come up with really creative sort of strange solutions. Uh because on Bitcoin, it's an entirely different model. It's called the UTXO model. And so instead of having, you know, this EVM where you have all this data available and the ability to arbitrarily do whatever you
want based on that data and look at the data of another smart contract. Bitcoin is this really siloed thing in multiple ways. Uh the first is with that UTXO model you're you're you know Bitcoin does have smart contracts technically you can write some very limited uh logic in what's called Bitcoin script uh but you have no flow control so you can't do you know a loop or jump or go to uh you don't have any sort of uh access to what else is happening on Bitcoin. So on Ethereum I can write an app that looks at a unis swap pair and looks at the current price and liquidity and then does something based on that. Bitcoin, you can't even look at whether say another transaction's confirmed or whether an address exists or a a UTXO has been spent. You have no context in
your when you're executing a Bitcoin smart contract and you know spending a UTXO. You don't have any of that context, any of that awareness of what else is happening on Bitcoin. Where am I? You know, the only thing you really have access to is like what's the time stamp, what's the block, that's about it. And so you have to come up with these constructions that work around those limitations in interesting ways. And so the first version of our Bitcoin tunnel uh we're using something called overcolateralized multisig. And so basically anyone can spin up a custodianship vault. they can post collateral and then be part of this collateralization system that uses uh one of the technologies we built called HVM or the hemi virtual machine which is a way to basically introspect Bitcoin from inside an EVM uh very dynamically
very gas efficiently without any sort of uh oracle or relayer so it's you know you have a bitcoin full node running in the EVM that's smart contracts you can write smart contracts that can look at that and see okay here's what's happening on Bitcoin this UTXO is not spent this one was spent in this transaction and then you can write systems that observe what's happening on Bitcoin in the context of you know where should certain Bitcoin the protocol cares about be and then if it sees it moves okay was that a valid withdrawal or not then it can go and you know punish operators take their collateral use that to reby you know hemib BTC on the open market to re to make sure the system remains solvent so that's the first model and then the second model that we're working on is a bit VMbased
one uh which will be extremely capital efficient extremely secure with one event security or uh basically this idea it's kind of like the spiritually when if you remember the old ZK networks where they had this setup ceremony and they said as long as one person's honest this whole system works fine. BitVM is very similar to that where you can say okay we have a hundred or a thousand participants who all do this sort of setup ceremony in a way and then as long as one of them destroys their private key or doesn't like actively uh collaborate with all the other people in the tunnel then those funds are secure and it can only be withdrawn with you know valid proof of you know this person should be able to withdraw these funds on BitVM side.
Now there's some with BitVM there's uh especially with the current BitVM2 design there's a limitation that's really hard to work around due to that lack of uh Bitcoin introspection I mentioned. So you're not able to in a Bitcoin script you're not able to say hey did that transaction get completed that did this other thing that should have been done in order for me to release these funds. And so with BitVM you need this model where you have liquidity providers who front liquidity. And so you have a BitVM vault with 100 Bitcoin in it. If somebody wants to withdraw that 100 Bitcoin, you need a liquidity provider who's part of that BitVM uh vault construction to front the 100 Bitcoin, send it to the user, and then basically prove that they did that,
prove they fronted the liquidity to then reimburse themselves from the BitVM vault. And that's a limitation of the way that you need to set up all these different transaction graphs on Bitcoin ahead of time. You can't have, you know, an arbitrary destination because we don't have covenants on Bitcoin. So, you can't put Bitcoin in a vault and say, "We don't know where it could possibly go, but we're going to limit it in all these creative ways." And, you know, okay, it could go to one of these 100 liquidity providers, and then they're going to front this liquidity, and then they'll be able to reimburse. And so, the way that that system is constructed with BitVM 2, it has to use this really roundabout way of proving to itself that another action took place in Bitcoin, the liquidity provider, fronted the liquidity. And the way they do that uh
is with a thing called superb block light client emulation which was uh borrowed from if anyone remembers the old uh Nepapow days of like 2014 with uh proofs of proofs of work. It borrows some ideas from that. Uh but the problem is Bitcoin miners can go and ransom attack that system. And so there's this observation period where basically you the the person who fronted the liquidity waits you know two weeks or a week or whatever. It's a security parameter of the protocol and then they say okay here's the best super block that I saw which means the Bitcoin block with the lowest uh hash basically that's very unlikely to occur but statistically you know if you have a thousand blocks 500 of them will be you know half the the
target and 250 will be a fourth. And so you use that kind of a system to say, "Okay, here's the best block I saw." It'd be really hard for somebody to fake that and attack the system. And then there's this challenge period where somebody could come in and say, "Hey, I saw a better super block as in a lower hash." And basically eject that liquidity provider from the system and remove them from the ability to refund themselves with liquidity. So it's very secure from the perspective of it's very hard for an operator to attack that system and withdraw funds in an invalid way. But Bitcoin miners, you know, when they mine a block, they could choose to withhold it from the network. And people mining on a pool, when they mine a share that mines a block, they could choose to withhold that share from the pool. And
so you get the situation where people who are mining, whether it be individual miners or uh, you know, pools or wherever at multiple levels of the stack. They could see, hey, I have this Bitcoin block that's a very plausible super block and there's a bunch of BitVM vaults closing. I'm going to withhold this and then ransom attack the operators. And so you get this upper bound of, you know, the BitVM2 standard construction can only secure, you know, you can argue where exactly the line is, but you know, three or six or 10 bitcoin somewhere around the Bitcoin block award or maybe even a little bit lower uh in a vault without being having the economics screwed up for those sorts of ransom attacks. So one of the cool things we're doing with Hemi is Hemi is this uh external observer of Bitcoin consensus in a very censorship resistant way. So
if unless you were able to completely censor Ethereum and completely censor Hemi simultaneously, you can't prevent the Hemi protocol from getting up-to-date information about what Bitcoin consensus looks like from the entire world. Anyone can say, "Hey, I see these block headers. Hey, I see these block headers." And so this external observer Bitcoin consensus, you can reflect that now back to Bitcoin as part of the whole ZK proof that's validated as part of the BitVM construction to say instead of a superb block light client way of trying to sample Bitcoin and figure out what block is actually on the cononical chain and prove this and prove that, you can instead just say, hey, this external system that's extremely hard to censor, this is the view that it sees, the cumulative inputs from everyone in the
world who's observing Bitcoin, this is what that system sees. here's what it looks like and we can trust that and validate Bitcoin activities against that and so that uh that small tweak makes us you can build these really secure bitm2 based you know variant of bitvm2 vaults and it also acts as a public good because hem is basically this censorship external observer bitcoin consensus it's not just that we can use that for settlement of our bitv vaults but anyone else could basically take those same proofs and say hey if we trust hemi security model for this antiens censorship thing. We can reuse those proofs in our protocol. We don't have to, you know, go through Hemi or, you know, connect to them in this way or that way. It's just, you know, kind of like Bitcoin is a great uh
uninfluenceable random number generator. So, you know, if you and I want a fair bet, we could bet based on the last bit of the next Bitcoin block. Similarly, and yeah, it doesn't you don't have to pay Bitcoin transaction fees to do that. You don't have to no Bitcoin miners or anything like that. Uh so too with Hemi it's just emitting or once we launch this it will be emitting these uh proofs of Bitcoin consensus in this very censorship resistant way. So you can say hey let's take that let's plug it into our bitv system make it more secure benefit from that public good and then everyone's using you know depending on that adoption but everyone will be using very similar uh vault designs and so if they're swapping out superlock like clientline emulation for these proofs then you have this whole you know network of networks moving together with
similar custodianship mechanisms that can also lead to improvements in interoperability and so on so forth. So there's a very long rambly answer but that's the uh the highle bitcoin tunnel. the first version this over collateralized thing, second version this uh bit VM and then solving that super block client emulation problem. Awesome. Okay. So, so right now a a a sort of trusted multi-IG setup where anybody can can join and set up one of these vaults to uh participate in in in this tunnel. As BitVM progresses, you guys are able to adapt that technology.
Um when it and then bringing back to to HemiVM running a full Bitcoin node which for those in the audience that basically means downloading the entire Bitcoin blockchain and updating it every single block within the Hemi VM or the HVM which is an EVM orientation currently running what I understand to be Hemi is running this single sequencer somewhere with with there's certain plan like there's plans to eventually do some uh potential collocation things or uh rotating the sequencer I'm sure getting to stage one stage two etc. But the trust assumption that we currently are set with is similar to any other single sequencer L2 which is effectively we
need to trust that the sequencer isn't being malicious in if if if the sequencer is act is ordering the transactions in the first come first-s serve basis which I assume is what it is then everything is okay uh those th that those blocks are then being posted to Ethereum um and are getting the is getting a look through the Bitcoin full node in HVM uh to also post that that onto Bitcoin in some like kind of fill in on on the settlement. Is it like a multi- settlement process happening here or are you just using the legitimacy of the Bitcoin node and the integrity of that to verify uh the the data of the actions
on the L2 in that given block? or like or like what is the where does the extent of this of the quote unquote uh settlement which I kind of think is a meme but like where is the security derived from directly is it both of the Ethereum and Bitcoin and then what is the kind of data availability uh process look like? Yeah, good question. So I think probably walking through kind of the transaction life cycle might be helpful and then we can dive into some of the nuances there. So basically you post a transa you send a transaction to Hemy's peer-to-p peer network. It propagates it's picked up by our single at this point single sequencer. Uh we have plans to decentralize that with Ethereum style proof of stake plus
single slot finality. And the uh one of the cool things is the way that we inherit Bitcoin security using something called proof of proof. It gives us Bitcoin finality after about 90 minutes, which means no matter who has what amount of consensus power on the Hemi network, once something reaches Bitcoin finality, you could not revert it unless you went and 51% attack Bitcoin itself to retroactively write different data into the Bitcoin chain. And so that basically gives us the ability when we do decentralize the sequencer to do it with a consensus protocol that preserves livveness over safety. It's the the classic trade-off. Everyone talks about having, you know, instant finality. And the the truth of it is when you really boil it down, and there's nuance here,
of course, but they're basically saying it has instant finality because instead of forking, it will halt permanently. And so, you can argue whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, whether you know, social recovery is better than having an automatic tactical rework, whatever. I tend to think you know resilient systems that survive on their own without humans coming together and intervening in some giant you know network reset is more valuable but so that's why Ethereum chose its consensus protocols because it is livveness preserving so Ethereum can fork it can reorg you know the happy case it gets finality after 15 minutes or really seven minutes but say 15 and then you can add this you know best case single slot finality that doesn't threaten that
but anyway so right Now uh single sequencer and then the plan is to decentralize it with Ethereum style proof of stake which we can do because of proof of proof inheriting Bitcoin security and then sequencer puts it into a block. The block gets propagated. Anyone who's running a full node can see the block optimistically that's signed by the sequencer and so they accept it as tenatively valid. Uh but it's not guaranteed to be part of the chain until it does actually get published to Ethereum DA. Uh once a sequencer signs a block, they propagate it to the network. everyone accepts it as a tenative block basically and assumes it's correct but doesn't you know it doesn't have finality yet because it still needs to get through Ethereum DA and through Bitcoin uh you know publication to Bitcoin basically so that block after a
period of time will get published to Ethereum DA so right now that's roughly 15 minutes between a block getting created and being published in a batch to uh Ethereum for DA and blobs and then uh proof of proof miners will see that new block on the network or a nearby keystone. And I'll quickly cover the keystone piece. Basically, you don't want to publish a ton of unnecessary data to Bitcoin. And because Bitcoin has a block time of 10 minutes, there's no point in publishing a 100 block headers and then them all getting uh, you know, recognized by Bitcoin at once, basically. So, we have this keystone period set to five minutes. That's based on, you know, half the bit Bitcoin block time going much below that. You're paying a lot for publications and not getting the benefit. uh but every five
minutes there's a keystone block every 25 blocks and then proof of proof miners take that bitcoin take that uh hemi block header and publish that to bitcoin in a bitcoin transaction and then hemi uses that fork resolution so if there is ever a fork so if multiple competing versions of hemy's chain that are you know internally consistent they could be valid chains they're not you know invalid state transitions if those got published to Ethereum DA then the fork resolution protocol uses those publications on Bitcoin to decide glitch chain is actually canonical and the end result of that is you get a system where when it's operating normally you get Bitcoin finality after 90 minutes and everyone can see that you have that it would be impossible for the fork resolution algorithm to ever get off of
this chain up to this point because it would need other uh publications of an alternate chain published to Bitcoin blocks that have already been mined. So you have to revert those Bitcoin blocks basically to insert retroactively insert data to get fork resolution to say okay it's not this chain anymore it's now this chain over here and so you have this wave of Bitcoin finality that slowly chunks up the chain in you know Bitcoin 10-minute intervals and uh after about 90 minutes you get Bitcoin finality again you know that uh it can't be reverted without attacking Bitcoin itself or if there is an attack ongoing the attacker has to publish headers of their attack to Bitcoin at which point it's publicly visible to everyone. So you either see there is no attack going
on and the chain is secure up to this height unless there's a Bitcoin reorg or there is somebody who's doing an attack on the chain. They're publishing these headers to Bitcoin and locked up with the legitimate quote unquote publications. everyone can see that and they know to wait until that situation resolves and one of the two forks gets chosen as finally being you know true Bitcoin finality and the whole network agreeing and reworking onto that one single agreed upon chain. Uh so that that's high level the security model from a consensus perspective and then there's the settlement side which is you know standard settlement on the Ethereum side using the optimistic stack uh settling to Ethereum and then on Bitcoin it's that Bitcoin tunneling system we talked about first with the uh
overcolateralized uh vaults where if somebody misbehaves HVM can observe that misbehavior by seeing you know Bitcoin was moved to the wrong place or at the wrong time or in the wrong way and take that person's collateral and use that to keep the system solvent and then eventually that bit VM variant that we're working on. Yeah. Okay. Great. Okay. That makes it paints a much better picture. I think it's now it's basically fair to say that Hemi has the same uh trust assumptions when ordering transactions uh as any other single sequencer L2. However, the effectively the settling and the the lack of or the reorg protection is significantly stronger in terms of when
transactions are settled due to kind of obtaining the security from Bitcoin itself as well as Ethereum, you're going to be you're you'll get better finality guarantees here than on uh chains which just use Ethereum for finality. um which is really helpful for interrupt because effectively a lot of uh you know solvers or market makers they take inventory risk when trying to do crosschain transactions. Obviously having like something like single slot finality is ideal. Shout out to Cosmos SDK and Tenderment that never kind of made it into Ethereum uh land and into L2s for a variety of reasons namely because the L1 just has slow block times or long block
times and slow set times. But basically what you guys will get is is the property of bas of you know you should be able to have better guarantees for your bridging in and out of of Hemi due to this setup which which I think is good. One kind of two dynamics that I think you guys will kind of run into obstacles with is one you guys are if you're going to achieve what you want to achieve I think one you will uh you will push Ethereum's blob capacity relatively quickly. Uh I think is coming very soon though. I think like within two weeks. Today's the 24th of March. Don't know when this goes out, but um that'll help.
But I still think you guys may need more throughput. Something like I DA Celestia uh Avail could be interesting. And then the second one is um some sort of some sort of community dilemma here where like trying to figure out who who like I just think that there's a difference between Ethereum and Bitcoin communities and trying to like kind of walk that line and be and be be both will be interesting and fun. Um, and then obviously just like scaling out the sequencer into a more uh censorship resistant kind of way. Um, I think there'll be several L2s this year that launch at stage one or stage two even and I think that'll put a lot of pressure on those who aren't to kind of get going on that. Um, so those are some
some things that came to the top of my mind. Um, so we talked about the consensus, we talked about the execution, um, we talked about the the kind of overall posting of the data and of the security properties. Um, I'm curious where you guys see Hemi fitting in in terms of differentiation from the other uh, rollups and chains in the space. I think we have quite a bit of chain fatigue, if you will. I think people are dying for more apps. Um, so like what do you guys believe is your differentiating whether it be on the tech side, distribution or community?
Um, and then as we kind of wrap, we'll talk more about kind of what's coming next. I'm pretty heavily biased in terms of I think we differentiate on all those factors. Okay. And you have Jeff as your as your co-founder. That's also helpful. the uh fundamentally uh I look at all the other competition as comparables and I see kind of two sorting hats. Uh you know, people silo into the I'm a Bitcoin L2 or silo into the I'm an Ethereum L2 camp. And I I think it's uh nonproductive to be so siloed. Uh so I think uh we already are several chess
moves ahead in terms of that. uh the uh you know many of the other Bitcoin L2s, they did not extend they staple gunned an EVM onto a Bitcoin anchoring solution, but they didn't update the EVM to actually talk Bitcoin. As far as I'm aware, they we're the only ones in the industry that's done that. We added Bitcoin op codes to the EVM itself. So that uh me as a a Bitcoin script developer, my uh ability to program just, you know, 10xed or 100xed because now I can program Bitcoin L1 on solidity, you know, at the smart contract level. And so now I have all
the the loops and the function calls and uh state uh preservation that Bitcoin script itself natively doesn't have. And so even if I'm a Bitcoin maxi, I've just extended the ability to develop Bitcoin into a new dimension. So I think that's that's new, unique, comparable. Uh talking to both uh is uh new, unique, and comparable. Um the uh community is uh pretty amazing. I've uh been surprised by the metrics that we're seeing. I know everybody loves to like count like Telegram users and Discord users in absence of better metrics and
we do a little of that too. But one interesting facet and one of the over 50 apps that are already on Emmy is a project from our ecosystem called Damos Demos and uh what it actually does is it does proof of human. So it allows you to uh prevent civil attacks and uh kind of duplicate account uh type things but in a way that doesn't collect KYC. So, as far as I'm aware, that's the only uh solution that doesn't collect KYC. And that uh that leads into uh the community having uh as far as we can tell, over
80,000 unique users, unique humans uh that weren't botted or or uh some other cloning technology. And so, I've never seen a community that healthy, that strong this early. Um, so I feel really blessed uh on that side. And then uh you know just the programmability of uh being able to uh extend Bitcoin by literally having a Bitcoin node inside of the EVM is uh a new dimension of programmability on the Bitcoin main chain uh that we're bringing. So I think that uh gives us an edge but ultimately I there's there's a lot of leaning into
uh again the uh we're we're getting a lot of pull I I shouldn't say leaning into we're getting a lot of pull in the direction of Bitcoin mining pools, Bitcoin DeFi. Uh that's where like liquidity providers are grabbing us by the necks and saying you know we need this lending market or this uh you know particular setup so that we can earn yield on your chain and kind of keep the uh you know keep the keep the bitcoin close to home such that we can exit directly to bitcoin directly to BTCL1 from your chain we don't have to bounce anywhere else so uh a lot of energy from uh those particular interactions
add there. Max, anything to add? No, I think that covers it. Uh, I'd say just on the application side, one of the Jeff talked about the Bitcoin node embedded in the EVM and some of the the new design patterns you can do around that as a developer. I think the all every all of the Bitcoin L2s we've seen so far have only focused on one of two ways of programming Bitcoin which is move the Bitcoin onto the L2 treat it as an ERC20 and then do a bunch of Ethereum things with it which I think is great and that's where most of the energy is going to be you know this year next year or five years in the future but there's this whole other model of leaving the assets natively on Bitcoin and setting up systems that in incentivize people to do uh or interact on Bitcoin in certain
ways that are in their economic best interest and avoid ever having the need to bridge or tunnel those assets over to an L2 and have this custodianship system involved. And so one of the things with HVM is for the first time ever you can build applications that observe all kinds of different changes to Bitcoin state again with no uh no authority, no oracle, no relayer. It's just pure Bitcoin unadultered Bitcoin state fully indexed accessible in the EVM and fully backwards compatible. Anything that works on optimism or Ethereum, you can launch here and it runs fine. But if you want to use these new features, they're there and available to get this Bitcoin data. You can build applications where you leave the stuff natively on Bitcoin.
So you can use that for native Bitcoin staking systems. So leave your bit, you know, lock your Bitcoin in a certain way on the Bitcoin network. It's never tunnneled over. We you can observe it and then you can let them be an ads and secure system. You can do that for uh completely decentralized non-custodial dexes or lending protocols. Uh there's even cool stuff like Bitcoin meplaces, you know, being able to pay your Bitcoin transaction fee or like an accelerator fee in USDC or ETH or whatever from the Ethereum ecosystem or the Bitcoin ecosystem. And I think also the we're doing all that Bitcoin programmability, but in the context of also being fully connected to Ethereum. And so it's a one-two punch of you can build better Bitcoin applications that either have,
you know, this new variant of Bit VM for example or leverage that in an interesting way uh or they're using, you know, this tunnled over Bitcoin directly or they're doing this cool thing with non-custodial uh movement of Bitcoin assets and observing that and collateralizing it appropriately. But you're doing all that in the context of all the assets, all the liquidity that Ethereum has that can natively come over and interact in those protocols. And you're doing it in a way where in the future you could take Bitcoin and T part of the reason we called it tunnels is it's not just going from Bitcoin and Ethereum to Hemi and then back to both networks respectively.
You can go in the future you'll be able to go from one network through Hemi to the other network. So you can take Bitcoin, bring it through that, you know, BitVM style custodianship system. Take that, go through the highsecurity L2 settlement style tunnel on the Ethereum side and you've just moved Bitcoin in a very secure manner to the Ethereum ecosystem where you could go use it on Ethereum base layer on Optimism, arbitrync, whatever. And you know, whenever you look at asset transfers through the ecosystem and interoperability, you're only as secure as your weakest link. So if you move, you know, a token from Bitcoin to an L2 and that's super secure, but then to move from the L2 to Ethereum, you're going through some, you know, trusted 305 uh, you know, oracle system. Well,
that's really your your risk, right? Is that 305 system, not the the native Bitcoin custodianship. And so being able to have this I wouldn't say an audit trail but this you know very secure every step of the way movement of Bitcoin to Hemi to Ethereum to the Ethereum ecosystem that starts opening up a a huge advantage for the Ethereum ecosystem being able to have secure Bitcoin natively in its pipes that we know is backed by really solid settlement custodianship tech when you go and unwind that whole train back to Hemi and finally back to Bitcoin ultimately That's what I think a lot of um Bitcoiners or just people that hold Bitcoin want is that level of security.
I spoke to a lot of uh institutions in the space and teams that are working on similar products and effectively what they want is the ability to borrow against their Bitcoin and to earn some small yield on it but to have it be in a very very safe place very close to the Bitcoin main chain. They also want it to not be wrapped typically. I know you guys have a hemi BTC product, but if they if it is wrapped, they want extremely verifiable proof of reserves on chain typically on the Bitcoin main chain. Um, so like many kind of risk uh considerations there that I'm glad to hear that you guys are thinking more deeply on. Um, as we kind of come to a close, I mean, it wouldn't be a Hemi podcast pre-token without a without a when token question. So, how does this
how does the distribution of the Hemi token look? Obviously we're try we are you know and from from words from speaking with a lot of the marketing peeps on your team very non-tokenoriented community very loyal real community here but when it comes to adding additional security to the network incentivizing developers and builders as well as community how how are you guys thinking about the next stages after mainet now what's the most important for for you guys on the community and uh growth and distribution side um and any kind alpha or uh information that you may be privy to that you could share with our community.
Yeah, the uh the the disappointing answer is we don't uh give much detail about the token. Um we're there's definitely going to be a Hemi token. Uh I guess I can uh uh let slip exclusively here. It's going to be uh an ERC20 on Ethereum L1 that's bridged to Hemi as our first step. Uh so that's uh that's a little bit of a technical detail, not an economic detail. Uh but uh we're we're focusing full force on talking to uh institutions, liquidity providers, uh big uh token issuers, and uh really bringing apps and assets onto the Hemi
chain. And so uh whether that's uh incentivized with a token or incentivized uh through some other means uh for example you know you get partnership A and they're really interested to work with partner B uh and you can bring them together on the hemi chain in a business fashion and uh you know one provides liquidity for the other and it's a really win-win type situation. So absent assets is uh you know growing those is where it's at and a lot of that is obviously uh bitcoin specific uh so we're talking with a lot of uh you know bitcoin whales miners capital providers uh
institutions uh to uh you know bring hemi connectivity and assets to hemi um with the token itself uh again uh we're going to be frustrating and not uh talk uh too much about uh those details. We we have a a bot on Discord that whenever anyone asks when TGE, it responds that uh it'll be sometime before GTA 6 is uh released by Rockstar Games. All righty, guys. Well, thank you Jeff and excited for the future of Hemi Max. Appreciate you joining us for the first time. Looking forward to having you back in the future. Both of you guys, congratulations on Maynet. Um,
also just congratulations for sticking through what people were calling a bare market the last two months. I don't know, we got to teach some of these newcomers what a real bare market is maybe one of these days, but that's right. Uh, keep on pushing. That's right. Thanks so much. Thanks for having us. All righty, guys. Thanks for having us.