November 2026 Update

📈 Market Update: Good Things Take Time

Disclaimer: Not financial advice.

October’s Monthly Closes:

BTC: -7.3%, ETH: -16.1%, SOL: -19.1%, SUI: -22.8%, MON: -39.5%

I was a bit surprised by the monthly close percentages this month, somehow it didn’t feel that bad. I guess this was just prices falling back to where they were not too long ago, giving back some of the new bull market’s progress thus far. However, I don’t think anyone is calling the recent rally a bull trap, I am still comfortable assuming that a new cycle has begun, which brings with it the inevitable downward swings as leverage is wiped and sentiment is reset. The unfortunate truth is that many people will actually lose money in the bull market, taking on too much risk and generally being impatient.

However, that’s not to say that this isn’t a dark time for crypto, in many ways:

🔪 Hacks Galore

Validators from Solflare and Blockdaemon, and $6b stolen from Binance in the biggest crypto hack ever. These are scary times. The dark side of AI is that it empowers hackers as much as the rest of us. We’re busying applying the latest patches.

Beyond validators and exchanges, it’s also disheartening to watch hardware wallet users get rugged. It was discovered this month that many Ledger users were affected by a supply chain compromise, with users on twitter taking apart their devices and identifying hacker chips installed before purchase. This follows the ColdCard wallet hack, due to a randomness generator flaw during wallet creation.

While I’m not affected personally, this does weigh on me emotionally. These hardware wallet users did everything right, and still got hacked. Until now, the ethos was crypto was about safely self-custodying your assets. Now, not only are exchanges and staking providers at risk, but also hardware wallets. It’s unclear what the safest way to self-custody crypto is, which is sad.

🕯️ Never Forget: Hetzner Solana Rug

While we’re on the doom and gloom topic, let’s remember what happened four years ago, on November 2nd, 2022, when hardware provider Hetzner turned off Solana validator machines representing 20% of mainnet stake. Many validators continue to use Hetzner today, defying their terms of service and risking shutdown at any moment. At H2O Nodes we use exclusively our own hardware, adding diversity and resilience to the networks we participate in.

🟠 Sui Hashi Public Launch

The team at Mysten Labs has been busy, and it’s almost time for Hashi’s launch on Sui mainnet. We’re participating with both our own validator and our whitelabel customers’, supporting the launch to enable native Bitcoin on Sui.

🌄 Solana Alpenglow

After a lot of testing on the private cluster, Solana has launched Alpenglow on mainnet. A total overhaul of the consensus mechanism, Anza and the other teams have been working nonstop to keep Solana at the forefront of blockchain tech.

This follows the shortening of block times from 400ms to 200ms. The next topics are enshrining local fee markets and multiple concurrent proposers. It really is impressive to look at Solana today compared to only one or two years ago. This isn’t a story about launching a chain and sitting around on a pile of tokens. This is a chain seriously pursing the blockchain holy grail of bringing finance on-chain. We are as excited as ever for the future of Solana and proud to be part of the fabric that keeps it running.

🇬🇧 See you at Breakpoint!

Solana Breakpoint is coming up fast! I’ll soon prepare my talk for validator day (“Block Zero”) on November 15th, giving a bull and bear case for Real Economic Value (REV) on Solana, in light of the recent SIMD improvements to the chain.

Wishing you warmth as we proceed into winter,

-Max Sherwood, H2O Nodes co-founder

PS: You can read this and previous editions of our newsletter on our blog page.