September Update

📈 Market Update: It’s Not Over ‘till It’s Over

Disclaimer: Not financial advice.

July’s Monthly Closes: BTC: -6.5% , ETH: +18.7% , SOL: +16.5%, SUI: -10.1%

August continued July’s momentum, albeit not in a straight line. As in any bull market, volatility is high, and leverage wipes are common again. In other words, weak hands get tested, and overzealous leverage traders get liquidated. If you’re not firmly strapped in, you’ll get left behind.

But there is reason to be hopeful in the short term, with Powell signaling September rate cuts coming, and no obvious macro events to create fear in markets. DeFi TVL, open interest on cexes, and the Ethena yield rate are still climbing. Not to mention, new treasury companies are being announced every day, not only for BTC and ETH but also SOL.

Honestly, I don’t have too much more to say about the markets right now. If you haven’t made money, you’re probably over-trading, or you picked the wrong coins. Don’t expect 2025 to be a repeat of 2021, you may have to be satisfied with less-than-wild profits. But the bull isn’t over yet - yield is ample and most blue-chips are still riding the bull market momentum. My 4-year cycle chart says October is the peak, though, so it’s definitely time to start taking profits if you haven’t already. (Not financial advice.)

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

💰We Invested in Raiku!

The latest addition to our steadily-growing venture portfolio is Raiku, a network for builders, validators, and the future of Solana. We’re excited to join some pretty big names in this seed round, and even more excited to see what the team comes up with.

🔵 Solana: REV & SIMD-0326

But Raiku isn’t the only project in the Solana space promising more efficient transaction execution and increased REV for validators and stakers. We’ve been in touch with many firms who promise to rival the earnings of our current choice: the “revenue” scheduler of the Firedancer client. Could we squeeze some more earnings out of another client? Maybe. Are we currently happy with our experience running Firedancer, and are collecting competitive earnings? Yes.

In any case, we could soon see a shift in Solana’s economics as a result of SIMD-0326, which introduces the new Alpenglow consensus mechanism. We voted “yes” to proceed with its development and implementation, as did the large majority of validators.

🩵 Sui Whitelabel Validators

We’re now supporting not one, but two whitelabel validators on Sui. These are ecosystem projects who focus on making great products, not pulling their hair out running validators. With stake from Sui Foundation and infrastructure and devops from H2O Nodes, they are able to grow alignment with their communities and generate extra revenue. Everyone wins.

🤖 H2O Developer Services

In preparation for the upcoming launch of Mysten Labs’ new Seal product, we’re preparing a self-service portal for developers, to generate their own endpoints, monitor usage, and access other tools and services from the Sui ecosystem. Check out our new webpage, and stay tuned for more!

🟣 H2O Finance —> RevTec

New name, who dis? We’ve renamed our Solana staking protocol from “H2O Finance” to “RevTec”, to reflect the new focus on REV: our LST revSOL will earn not only Jito tips but also block rewards, via new functionality added to Jito’s Tip Router. Check out our docs to learn more, and stay tuned for our new landing page.

If you’d like to sign up for the separate RevTec newsletter, click here. You’ll also be able to read that newsletter once the new blog page goes live on the new website.

🍁 Here’s to a great autumn! Summer’s over, but it’s not all bad: cooler weather makes for better sleeping and less bugs. And we still have the Greek sun to look forward to - catch us at IslandDAO October 6th-12th!

All the best,

-Max Sherwood, H2O Nodes Co-founder