There are many older brothers named Jeff. Earlier this year, I wrote a brief biography of Jeff Yass from Haida, and there are also well-known figures like Amazon's Jeff Bezos and Hyperliquid's Jeff Yan from the crypto space, among others.

This time I discovered another core developer of Bitcoin and Linux, Jeff Garzik @jgarzik, who has made early contributions to Bitcoin's SegWit, JSON-RPC API, CPU miner, Python miner, and other infrastructure, making him one of the most knowledgeable people about BTC in the industry.

Looking back at Jeff Garzik's Twitter timeline over the past decade, it's easy to see how he differs from those BTC fundamentalists.

Many people believe that BTC is sufficient as the best value storage asset, which indeed was the best choice at the beginning of its design, bringing BTC nearly twenty years of faultless security.

However, with BTC now having a trillion-dollar market value, even a slight increase in leverage can impact the global economy. Jeff Garzik has been very enthusiastic about helping BTC holders build native yield since ten years ago.

Based on this philosophy, over the years Jeff Garzik and several other developers have built projects such as Bloq and Vesper. Unlike those chasing trends with continuous entrepreneurship, their teams are stable, clear in direction, and strong in execution.

From infrastructure development in 2015 to DeFi in 2020, and last year, they shifted their focus to @hemi_xyz, a modular Layer-2 network.

Hemi received $15 million in support from institutions like Yzi Labs (formerly Binance Labs). The mainnet was launched two months ago, achieving native 'Bitcoin programmability'. In just 38 days after launch, the TVL reached $1 billion, and currently, the TVL is $1.2 billion, quietly becoming the second-largest Bitcoin Layer-2.

Connecting BTC and ETH is the core issue of the BTC ecosystem Layer2. A common transitional solution on ETH is cross-chain (custodial mapping), and some BTC L2s have adopted this model, like another Jeff from Merlin. This model carries centralization risks, especially after Sun's involvement with WBTC raised widespread concerns recently.

The #HEMI approach is to integrate a complete Bitcoin node into the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). This innovative model combines the security of Bitcoin with the flexibility of Ethereum, unlocking direct access to fine-grained Bitcoin states for smart contracts, allowing users to lend native BTC through fully indexed nodes without relinquishing BTC control, utilizing DeFi protocols.

In terms of security, through another co-founder Maxwell Sanchez's PoP consensus, Hemi inherits Bitcoin's complete security in a fully decentralized and permissionless manner. Without compromising the trust model, it expands BTC from a currency to a smart contract platform.

From a participation perspective: you can directly stake assets on the Hemi Network official platform (invitation code 9c3fd156), or provide liquidity via ecosystems like Spectra (BTC annualized 4%) and DEMOS to achieve higher multiples. Hemi will also provide legendary-level NFT airdrops for the top 50 stakers in each selected liquidity pool.

If you have no spare funds, you can actively participate in community content creation. Although there is currently no Kaito content leaderboard, the official account gives away a dozen NFTs weekly to outstanding content creators on Twitter, with opportunities to win without needing to stake. Additionally, if there are future launches, there will be retroactive benefits, so you can participate in advance to avoid missing out later when everyone else is competing and you are left feeling frustrated.