Hemi Launching Mainnet on March 12, Uniting the Bitcoin and Ethereum Ecosystems Into a Single Supernetwork

[PRESS RELEASE – Chicago, Illinois, February 25th, 2025]

Powerful momentum continues after a record-breaking testnet phase, more than $300 million in total value locked (TVL), and dozens of ecosystem launch partners.

Hemi, a modular blockchain network powered by Bitcoin and Ethereum, today announced that it will launch its mainnet on March 12, 2025.

Key Facts

• Launching its mainnet on March 12, Hemi is a modular blockchain network designed for superior scaling, security, and interoperability, unifying Bitcoin and Ethereum as a single supernetwork.
• Over fifty protocols will be deployed on Hemi, including decentralized exchanges (e.g., Sushi, DODO, Izumi), lending protocols (e.g., LayerBank, ZeroLend), vaults (e.g., Nucleus, Concrete, VaultCraft), top LSTs and LRTs (e.g., Kelp, pumpBTC, StakeStone), oracles (e.g., RedStone, Pyth, Stork), and key dApps (e.g., LayerZero, Pell, BitFi).
• Hemi has already attracted more than $300 million of Total Value Locked (TVL) and announced a $15 million seed round in September 2024, led by Binance Labs, Breyer Capital, and Big Brain Holdings.
• Hemi was founded by renowned early Bitcoin developer Jeff Garzik and blockchain security pioneer Max Sanchez.

The transition from testnet to mainnet is a major milestone for Hemi, which has already attracted more than $300 million in total value locked (TVL) and rapidly built an ecosystem of dozens of protocols. This positions Hemi as a vital infrastructure layer for decentralized finance across Bitcoin and Ethereum, enabling innovation and scalability across the blockchain space.

Through the protocols offered by Hemi’s early Day One ecosystem collaborators, users will be able to:

• build applications that are both Bitcoin- and Ethereum-aware;
• participate in lending and DEX liquidity provision, or allocate funds into specialized vault products;
• trade perpetuals;
• stake and restake popular BTC and ETH tokens;
• borrow, and swap tokens; and
• create synthetic assets.

In particular, Hemi’s DeFi ecosystem has a strong focus on providing liquidity and yield opportunities for many of the most popular liquid staking tokens (LSTs) and liquid restaking tokens (LRTs) from the Bitcoin and Ethereum ecosystems.

“Just over six months after introducing our incentivized testnet, Hemi has demonstrated its resilience and capability as a powerful network for advancing blockchain applications across Bitcoin and Ethereum,” said Jeff Garzik, co-founder of Hemi.

“The Hemi team has a clear and compelling vision for unlocking the programmability, portability, and potential of Web3,” said Ted Breyer, partner at Breyer Capital. “With a distinguished track record, they are uniquely positioned to deliver.”

A Layer-2 from a Different Point of View

Attempts to integrate and scale Bitcoin and Ethereum have tended to address the problem within their respective communities, resulting in a fractured ecosystem. Hemi instead approaches Bitcoin and Ethereum as components of a larger supernetwork. This surfaces the key capabilities of both networks and, in turn, enables a new class of previously unattainable blockchain applications.

Hemi’s benefits include:

• Unifying Bitcoin and Ethereum — The Hemi Virtual Machine (hVM) integrates a full Bitcoin node within an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), enabling developers to harness the power of both Bitcoin and Ethereum using familiar and proven development tools.
• Bitcoin Programmability — Building with the Hemi Bitcoin Kit (hBK) provides developers direct access to highly granular views of Bitcoin’s state, unlocking new applications that were previously impractical or impossible to execute in a truly trustless, secure, and efficient way.
• Superfinality — Through its PoP consensus protocol, Hemi inherits Bitcoin’s full security in a truly decentralized and permissionless manner, exceeding Bitcoin-level finality (“superfinality”) in just a few hours.
• Trustless Cross-Chain Portability — With Tunnels, Hemi offers a Bitcoin-secured method for moving assets between Bitcoin and Ethereum.
• Asset Programmability — Hemi’s additional asset-programmability features include on-chain routing, time-lock, and password-protect. Gasless transfer enables asset movement without requiring a web3 wallet.

“The Hemi team can be described in one word: ambitious. Everything we learned during our testnet has been embedded into the mainnet release and we are excited for our users and developers to build and use applications across Bitcoin and Ethereum,” said co-founder and CTO Max Sanchez.

About Hemi Labs

Hemi Labs is the creator of the Hemi Network (“Hemi”), a modular Layer-2 network for superior scaling, security, and interoperability, powered by Bitcoin and Ethereum. Instead of approaching Bitcoin and Ethereum as siloed ecosystems, Hemi views them as components of a single supernetwork, unlocking new levels of programmability, portability, and potential. Hemi Labs envisions a new, converged Internet ecosystem that is secure, interoperable, and ready for the many challenges of a Web3 that is imminently colliding with the Internet at large.

Users can learn more at https://hemi.xyz/.

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