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 going live on Wednesday, the company said.

According to Hemi Labs, the Hemi Network is a modular layer-2 blockchain network built for superior scaling, security, and interoperability between Bitcoin and Ethereum. The Hemi Network uses a "Proof-of-Proof" (PoP) consensus, Hemi Labs explained, which enhances security on the Bitcoin blockchain and advanced interoperability between it and the Ethereum network.

“PoP introduces a new form of miner – a PoP Miner – who periodically snapshots consensus info from Hemi and publishes it to Bitcoin in exchange for a mining reward paid by the protocol,” Sanchez told Decrypt.

In addition to his duties as co-founder, Sanchez also acts as lead architect at Hemi Labs.

“The protocol uses these state publications to determine Hemi’s canonical chain, meaning attacking chains would have to be published to Bitcoin in lock-step, which would be observed by all network participants,” Sanchez said.

"One of the questions we asked ourselves while designing and building Hemi was 'What do we want as developers that we currently do not have, even given the current energy and innovation in the layer-2 space,” Hemi Labs co-founder Jeff Garzik told Decrypt in a statement. “This quickly opened up explorations of 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) offers developers the best-possible insight into both chains.

“The Hemi Bitcoin Kit (hBK) takes that work and makes it available to any developers who are today asking the same questions we did," he added.

To accomplish this, Hemi Labs uses a version of Ethereum Virtual Machines (EVM) called Hemi Virtual Machines (hVM).

“To ensure complete EVM compatibility, we designed hVM by adding new “precompiles” which allow smart contracts to interact with the embedded Bitcoin node,” Sanchez explained. “Unless a dApp is specifically designed to interact with these precompiles, their code will execute exactly as it would on any other EVM.”

Sanchez explained that developers wanting to use hVM's "Bitcoin awareness" can either directly call the precompiles or use the Hemi Bitcoin Kit (hBK), which simplifies the process by handling the complexities of these interactions.

“Building Bitcoin-aware dApps requires a reliable source of Bitcoin data that smart contracts can access,” Sanchez said. “Ethereum has hosted various Bitcoin header relay systems for nearly a decade, which allow contracts to verify a specific transaction relayed by a third party exists on Bitcoin. But there’s a lot more happening on Bitcoin than what these proofs can verify."

Edited by Stacy Elliott.