February 2026 Update

📈📉 Market Update: Bear, baby, bear

Disclaimer: Not financial advice.

January's Monthly Closes: BTC: -10.1% , ETH: -17.5% , SOL: -15.3% SUI: -17.9%

Usually I prepare these newsletters a few days in advanced. But the brutality of market action on Jan 30th in the metals market, and Jan 31st in the crypto markets, brings me back to the keyboard this morning.

I’ve always maintained that the 4-year cycle is in full effect. Bearish market action fits firmly within the context of the 4-year cycle, which stated that the bear market began after the October 2025 peak.

It has been brutal to watch crypto suffer while stocks, gold, and silver rally, but the recent breakdown in the metals market reveals the leverage underneath, and are perhaps even an omen of a correction to come in a hot stock market.

At H2O Nodes, we quietly sit atop our bear-market cash stash, and watch a different price rally: computer memory, which is now 5x what it was 4 months ago.

We feel very lucky that we upgraded our servers with more memory last year… Maybe we should also invest some of our capital into Mircon or Sandisk to hedge ourselves. But, even despite memory prices, we find a way:

🤖 More Hardware Investments

Even exorbitant RAM prices can’t stop our hardware purchasing addiction! (There’s still used servers for sale, and we know people… ) Those familiar with our setup know that we are fans of high-availability setups, specifically running multiple machines in proxmox clusters. Ordering three machines at once isn’t cheap, but within a few weeks we’ll have yet another cluster up and running. This will give us room to ensure we have high performance while maintaining redundancy as we add more chains and validators to our operation.

☂️ Arcium

We’re officially one of the four launch partners for Arcium’s mainnet alpha cluster #1! Alongside Staking Facilities, Triton One, and Greenfield One, we’ll be helping run Arcium’s MPC technology to bring programmable privacy to Solana! I’ve personally known Nico and Yannik since their “Elusiv” days, and have fond memories of them presenting at one of my Ultimate meetups in Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg. Seeing them with a massive booth and main-stage talks at Breakpoint felt like them completing their arc. But really, this is just the beginning - we are very excited to be on board and can’t wait to help get this thing running!

🟡 Canton

We’re also coming to Canton! One of our customers from the Sui ecosystem asked us to be their node operator on Canton, and we’re onboarding now. I’ve been hearing more and more about Canton in recent weeks, and had already begun looking into the chain, so the timing is perfect!

Canton’s “network of networks” gives each partner a private network to launch their application on, run by their node operator of choice and secured by Canton’s global synchronizer. In the mean time, Canton Coin is now the 20th biggest crypto token by market cap, thanks to its fully-diluted economics that recall bitcoin’s emission schedule. (All transaction fees are burned, to keep supply in check.)

Keep an eye out for our formal announcement on twitter in the coming days!

😢 Shutting Down Gnosis, NEAR, Supra

To free up mental and computational headroom, we’ve shut down our validator nodes for Gnosis, Near, and Supra. The economics of these chains weren’t working for us, despite some limited Foundation support on Gnosis and Supra, and staking pool support on Near. Thank you to those of you who staked with us, and apologies for the inconvenience of having to move your stake.

3️⃣3️⃣ Layer33, Solana’s indieSOL Pool

Layer33 continues to make progress on the RPC service offering. We’ll likely contribute the frontend / platform UI that we built but never launched. In the mean time, I’m helping with content on the twitter page now and again. Validators reach out in my DMs asking how to join. The pain is real for independent validators, with now less than 800 active on the network.

⚖️ Solana Governance Platform Sneak Peek

Finally we’ve seen the first glimpse of the long-awaited governance tool, built by Exo Tech and devs from Solana Turbine and Solana Foundation. Bryan from Titan Analytics put out a tweet calling for testnet validators to help test the platform, by submitting and voting on proposals. It’s not pretty, but it’s a big step toward making Solana’s governance framework rock-solid, as described on my vibe-coded solanaconstitution.com.

🟣 RevTec, Launching Soon (TM)

We’re on track with our target to finish the app at the end of this month, with an audit from Accretion to be done in March. We may share with friends and family already before completion of the audit, with appropriate disclaimers. Don’t hesitate to reach out if you want to join the “friends and family” telegram group.

Interestingly, block rewards seem to have bottomed, and have increased the previous few epochs.

I haven’t yet examined dex volume or memecoin volumes, but it would be perfect to launch RevTec in an environment of increasing block rewards, as the revSOL APY would be likely to outperform default staking.

All the best,

-Max Sherwood, H2O Nodes Co-founder