January 2026 Update

📈📉 Market Update: Small Bear?

Disclaimer: Not financial advice.

December's Monthly Closes: BTC: -3.2% , ETH: -0.7% , SOL: -6.8% SUI: -6.2%

It feels like everyone took a breather in December. Markets hardly moved, which after November’s bloodbath was a welcome change. I believe we are in the midst of this cycle’s bear market, but one I anticipate will be nothing like 2022’s savage bear market, which ripped apart the industry’s largest players (Terra Luna, 3Arrows Capital, Celsius, Genesis, FTX, …) and brought DeFi TVL and token prices to their knees.

This bear market is a curious one, as global interest rates gently fall, the stock market and gold/silver make new all time highs. This will be the first crypto bear market in memory that is not correlated to a broader macro bearish environment. It sucks to be the ugly duckling. Maybe we should just hold Nvidia and gold instead?

In any case, at the helm of H2O Nodes I have little fear, as our whitelabel business continues to buffer our income, and Solana block rewards remain low, but not entirely insignificant. Now, we just need to launch RevTec and find some early support there.

🌴 Breakpoint

Breakpoint was, as usual, an amazing conference with a fantastic turnout from the community. My REV Overview talk at Block Zero (Validator Day) went very well, as did my breakout room session on RevTec. As they weren’t recorded, I made my own recordings for both here.

While it was my 3rd Breakpoint, it was the first time being joined by my co-founders and colleagues, as well as the first time representing the new RevTec brand, and I think we made a good impression. Next year, London!

3️⃣3️⃣ Layer33, Solana’s indieSOL Pool

Layer33 continues to gather momentum, with our leader NickyScanz presenting on the main stage at Breakpoint and a few in-person meetings having me inspired for what we can build together. This, as more validators die off and shut down their Solana operations… It’s a race against time, and we intend to start 2026 off strong.

⚖️ Solana Governance

I made another iteration of the solanaconstitution.com site, adding Tushar and Nick’s Breakpoint talk, as well as their process flowcharts and even a simulator tool, to better understand the governance changes coming soon to Solana.

🟣 RevTec

We’re now aiming to launch by the end of February, this is the final push. Some good conversations around Breakpoint have me encouraged that we’ll be able to find support for initial liquidity for revSOL and issSOL, which was my biggest concern post-launch. More to come.

All the best,

-Max Sherwood, H2O Nodes Co-founder