August Update

📈 Market Update: BTC is Still King 👑

Disclaimer: Not financial advice.

July’s Monthly Closes: BTC: +8.00% , ETH: +48.8% , SOL: +11.2%, SUI: +30.1%

Bitcoin’s new all-time-high in mid-July sparked some very positive market sentiment. We then experienced a mini alt-season, but the question is, will it continue? The obvious parallel is November, when Trump’s election resulted in Bitcoin Dominance fell by over 5% in three weeks. But that alt season was short-lived. This time, the fall in bitcoin dominance was faster, but seems to be recovering already. It seems very hard to justify holding alts this cycle. BTC is king.

Last month, I wrote about SPACs and crypto treasury companies, most of which were focused on ETH. Since then, the treasury narrative has shifted to Ethereum, which is finally catching up in the market.

It’s also interesting to note that DeFi total TVL has finally passed its 2021 high, if you allow for double-counting. What strikes me is the steady build-up of TVL over the past two years, which looks much more sustainable than the rapid explosion we saw in the year of 2021. Looking at the TVL charts as measured in ETH and SOL shows an even smoother growth. Good stuff.

But enough about markets, what’s new for H2O Nodes?

🔵 Solana: As Busy As Ever

Our stake on Solana has reached a new all-time-high of 492K SOL, or around $90M. Some of it is from external sources, while some is a result of our bidding on Marinade’s Stake Auction Marketplace. (SAM)

We’ve recently been in touch with Raiku, Rakurai, and Spur, all of whom are offering technology to validators to improve revenue and MEV collection on Solana. Especially in light of Jito’s new fee-sharing upgrade to their tip router, it’s an interesting time for Solana revenue-sharing. I went ahead and vibe-coded  a dashboard at solsharing.com, to see which validators are sharing block rewards, and what effect it has on APY. Especially as we build out H2O Finance, this data will be important to communicate clearly to stakers. Expect improvements to the dashboard.

🦑 Ika Mainnet Launch

This week we helped to launch the mainnet of Ika, an MPC network built on top of Sui. We first talked to their team in December 2023, and invested in the project in spring of this year, alongside Sui Foundation. The token started trading around the price we expected, and has been gaining steam. The longer term test will be to see developers building on the solution.

🪁 Aztec Testnet

Our validator is in the queue for activation on Aztec’s adversarial testnet, which went live last week via a network upgrade. As one of the most well-respected (and well funded!) teams in the Ethereum ecosystem, we’re excited to see if they can make good on the promise of on-chain privacy.

🛠️ H2O Finance

We’ve made good progress on development of the protocol. Solbound have deployed the devnet contracts, and our full-stack dev is connecting them to our UI. Next steps will be to test the behavior and verify the economics work the way we expect. Once satisfied, we can bring it to an auditor.

We received an “honorable mention” in the Colosseum hackathon, which, considering over 1,400 projects submitted, isn’t bad. It has resulted in some outreach from judges and VCs, but since we are bootstrapping as long as possible, there isn’t much to do on that front.

If you’d like to sign up to our new H2O Finance newsletter, click here. You’ll also be able to read that newsletter once the new blog page live, as we build out the new website.

☀️ Don’t forget to touch grass and enjoy the summer while it lasts!
(Catch you at IslandDAO in October? )

All the best,

-Max Sherwood, H2O Nodes Co-founder