May 2026 Update

📈📉 Market Update: Hacks highlight DeFi risks

Disclaimer: Not financial advice.

April’s Monthly Closes:

BTC: 11.9%, ETH: 7.2%, SOL: 0.1%, SUI: 3.3%, MON: 9.2%

Despite a news cycle dominated by Trump <> Iran concerns, the stock market is ripping to new highs. Crypto markets show some optimism as well, having moved away from the lows. However, given we the 4 year cycle puts us solidly in the middle of the bear market, I will remain suspicious of any rally as a potential bull trap, until proven otherwise.

🌐 Solana Alpenglow Cluster

A private Solana test cluster launched on April 30th, made up exclusively of validators running the new Alpenglow consensus mechanism. We’ll be using spare hardware to join the cluster and gain initial experience with Alpenglow, which has the potential to significantly boost throughput on Solana mainnet, once ready.

🤖 Layer33 RPC Service

At Layer33 we’ve been busy supporting the implementation of an RPC service, running on hardware provided by the members of Layer33. The target customer? Anyone unhappy with their current RPC provider’s performance or reliability, who wishes to support independent validators, or is concerned about the ongoing centralization of Solana’s network and ecosystem. If you’re interested, don’t hesitate to reach out.

🟣 RevTec Entering Colosseum “Frontier” Hackathon

RevTec is almost ready for mainnet: the application is working well on devnet, and we’ll be deploying the new V2 contracts on mainnet soon. The timing coincides well with the latest Colosseum hackathon, which ends in mid-May. (We submitted RevTec to the previous two Colosseum hackathons and won “honorable mentions” in both…) As always, reach out if you’re interested in being one of the first people to test RevTec.

😢 Drift & Kelp Hacks

It was a busy month for North Korean hackers, who pulled off two $250M hacks in April. Although our business and customers had no exposure to the hacks, we are cognizant of the lasting scars that these will leave on the DeFi ecosystem.

On April 1st, Drift Protocol, a perps exchange and the largest DeFi protocol on Solana, was hacked for over $250M. On April 18th, the Ethereum liquid restaking protocol Kelp was hacked for $290M. Users were subsequently surprised to see Arbitrum’s “Security Council” manually freeze 30,766 ETH on the L2, highlighting a high degree of centralized control.

I’ve been around long enough to remember the Mango Markets hack, and thus I know how long-lasting the damage from these hacks can be, both to users and the protocol teams. Our hearts go out to everyone affected, and we continue to hope for the best outcome possible as the teams try to minimize the damage.

Stay safe: don’t trust, verify.

Use the bear market to build up your foundation for the next bull - and don’t forget to touch grass!

-Max Sherwood, H2O Nodes Co-founder