July Update

📈 Market Update: Good Month for BTC, Stocks, not Alts

Disclaimer: Not financial advice.

June's Monthly Close:
BTC: 2.4% , ETH: -1.6% , SOL: -1.0%, SUI: -14.4%

In reviewing the monthly closes of your favorite altcoins, you’d think June was a bad month for markets, but not so for BTC and stocks. BTC dominance continues its march, now past 65%. Memories of prior cycles leave us yearning for a good old-fashioned altcoin season, but with time running out before a theoretical October 4-year-cycle peak, I’m starting to wonder if we’ll have one at all.

The news is certainly starting to feel late-cycle - it’s been 4 years since I’ve heard the word “SPAC”, and now it’s everywhere. The biggest headlines from the month:

— Tether co-founder raising $1B for a “crypto reserve” SPAC of BTC, ETH, and SOL
— Anthony Pompliano's $1B BTC SPAC launching soon
— A $3B SPAC in the works from Softbank, Tether, Bitfinex

Pumping billions into Bitcoin sounds great to me, I just wonder how strong are the hands that will be holding it… Uncertain buyers can turn minor corrections (by our standards) into full blown panic, and the brutality of the SPAC unwind in 2022 makes me think that this SPAC reemergence is the beginning of the end for this bull market.

On a more positive note, let’s talk about H2O Nodes:

📈 Sui & Solana Stake Up 33%

We’re quite happy to report that our stake on Solana has reached an all-time-high of 300K SOL, or around $45M. This is due to the addition of stake from the new Firedancer Delegation Program, as well as the growth of the Marinade Select pool, which we joined last month.

Meanwhile on Sui, the Sui Foundation delegated an additional 9.5M SUI to our validator, bringing our total to 38M, or around $100M. This was in recognition for our increased involvement with co-organizing the monthly validator community calls, assisting with feedback around the recent governance proposals, supporting the ecosystem with whitelabel validator infrastructure, and beginning involvement with the First Movers developer community. It feels good to get recognition!

🇩🇪 Berlin Blockchain Week

Actually more like two weeks, Berlin Blockchain Week brought me back together with old friends, former colleagues, and new acquaintances for a week of conferencing. My appearances included pitching H2O Finance at the Solana Demo Day, and sitting on a panel at the German Blockchain Week.

On the H2O Finance front, we’re still working with SolBound on the design, and waiting to hear back from the Colosseum hackathon judges and also the Solana incubator, where we applied recently.

🛠️ Whitelabel Validators & Infra Redundancy

We’ve set up our new proxmox cluster of servers, and have almost migrated all our validator instances off of external hardware. Not only that, but we spun up our first whitelabel validator on Sui for a client. Feels good. Now, the question becomes, how do we increase the redundancy of our hardware? The obvious answer is to expand to a 2nd location. Good thing our friendly ISP Uvensys has us covered, with presence in multiple data centers surrounding Frankfurt. More to come.

💰 We’re Investing in aPriori

We’re finalizing our investment in aPriori, who are building MEV powered liquid staking on Monad. They will focus on providing the highest APY to stakers, and likely build a MEV sidecar client that competes with Fastlane. We’re very excited to join aPriori on their journey, and are eagerly awaiting more clarity around Monad’s staking model.

🛡️ Fortuna integration

As we continue to support the testnet of Ika, we’ve also managed to integrate with Fortuna, the chosen launch custodian for Ika. This represents our first custodian integration, and we’re very excited to support fellow Ika investors with staking of their tokens.

☀️ Wishing you a sunny July!

Catch you next month,

-Max Sherwood, H2O Nodes Co-founder