If you have been in contact with Web3 long enough, you must have heard these concepts:
Blockchain data is immutable;
Smart contracts are automatically executed agreements;
Addresses hold assets and permissions;
A wallet is your key to Web3.
These statements seem valid, but they hide a huge logical fallacy:
The technological implementation of Web3 has progressed, but the 'state management capability' has remained almost unchanged since 2017.
How do you determine if someone is a 'long-term authentic user' today?
Manually check transactions;
Find multi-chain data;
Synthesize behavioral paths;
It may still need centralized indexing services.
Contracts cannot directly judge, and users cannot see clearly. Everything is in the data, but the data is not the state.
This is why I was amazed by Hemi at first sight. It didn't say, 'I want to revolutionize blockchain', nor did it emphasize 'who to defeat'.
It just did one thing:
Making the 'state' in Web3 standardized, clear, composable, and executable for the first time.
What is the 'state paradigm'?
In simple terms, it means you are not writing logic around assets, not writing RPC around chains, not looking for records around addresses, but designing everything around whether the 'state is established or not'.
For example:
"Does the user hold a certain asset for more than 3 months?"
"Has the user never participated in a certain protocol?"
"Has the user ever completed a certain path combination behavior?"
"Has the user ever completed on-chain voting on BTC?"
In Hemi, these are no longer questions that 'require data analysts', but are if statements in contract logic.
Why was no one able to achieve this in the past?
Because of the lack of three things:
State abstraction mechanism: turning behaviors into structured nodes
Path combination mechanism: allowing nodes to form executable logical chains
State trust mechanism: enabling these states to be verifiable, anchorable, and not falsifiable
And these three things, Hemi did all of them:
State DAG abstracts any on-chain behavior into nodes;
Path execution logic allows contracts to execute according to state combinations;
The PoP mechanism writes the state hash into the BTC chain, ensuring that history is immutable.
So the state is not an innovation of Hemi, but a restoration of Web3.
It enabled this system for the first time to have the ability to 'understand users', a mechanism for 'explaining permissions', and a standard for 'reusable behaviors'.
We have been trapped in the vision of 'asset-centered' and 'address-centered' for too long,
But the essence of blockchain has always been:
"In an environment where no one trusts each other,
it can still accurately identify whether a certain state is truly established."
Hemi is simply shifting this capability from the bottom of the chain to the user logic layer.
