October Update

📈 Market Update: Is This The Top?

Disclaimer: Not financial advice.

September’s Monthly Closes:
BTC: 5.4% , ETH: -5.6% , SOL: +3.9%, SUI: +0.3%

While the stock market rips to new highs, crypto feels subdued after an exciting few summer months. According to the four year cycle, we’re within the timing band for a top. But since we haven’t seen a parabolic “blow off top” like in previous cycles, Bob Loukas entertains the possibility of a later top, perhaps at the end of this year or early next year. (One can hope!)

In any case, if the billions of inflows from DATs haven’t created the blow-off top typical of prior cycles, I don’t know what will. For those of you deep in profits, it’s time to take chips off the table. For those of you not deep in profits, I don’t know what to tell you. For traders, keep an eye out for cascading liquidation events to pick up heavily discounted coins and get good entries.

As money sloshes back and forth between BTC and altcoins, I’m keep an eye on  Bitcoin dominance. BTC is king, as it’s always been.

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

💰 We Invested in FastLane!

The latest addition to our steadily-growing venture portfolio is Fastlane, a Monad project building MEV-aware infrastructure and smart contracts to make DeFi useable and keep it decentralized. It sounds like they will also be entering the liquid staking arena on Monad, where we hope to support with our validator infra.

As always, the question on Monad is “wen mainnet?”. Weeks go by with no client updates for us to install as validators - it seems progress is slow. They have finally open sourced their staking mechanism, which will apparently be rolled into testnet soon, one of the last pieces to fall into place before mainnet. Their team still answers “2025” to the “wen mainnet” question, when asked by validators. I certainly hope they make it before the bull market is over. We’ve invested in a number of Monad staking projects by this point (aPriori, Kintsu, Fastlane) so we’re well positioned for launch… if it ever happens.

🔵 Solana Q3 REV Report & New Validator

Today we’ve released a report on Solana’s real economic value (REV) in Q3, as part of our effort to build the brand and narrative for RevTec.

The TLDR: fee-payers are increasingly using the Solana-native priority fee mechanism, instead of Jito Tips, to land transactions. While that has positive connotations for the network itself, it has a negative effect for stakers, who still earn Jito Tips and not priority fees from validators. We’re a few weeks away from the launch of our new RevTec validator, which will share 100% of Jito Tips, 100% of priority fees, and 90% of voting commission with stakers. Stay tuned.

🤖 H2O Developer Services

We’re still working on our self-service portal for developers, to generate RPC  endpoints, monitor usage, and access other tools and services from the Sui ecosystem. Stay tuned!

🇬🇷 We’re not at Token2049 in Singapore, instead we’re off to Greece next week for some valuable facetime and sun at IslandDAO! ☀️

All the best,

-Max Sherwood, H2O Nodes Co-founder