November Update

📈 Market Update: Bear, Is That You?

Disclaimer: Not financial advice.

October’s Monthly Closes:
BTC: -3.95% , ETH: -7.12% , SOL: -10.25% SUI: -27.50%

After the October 10th flash crash, the market has chopped sideways. But while stock market indexes make new all time highs, crypto feels subdued. This month should be the exact timing band for the top of the 4-year cycle, as per the timing of the previous cycles, but with Bob Loukas and Arthur Hayes both entertaining the idea of a break in the traditional 4-year cycle pattern, I’m wondering if we have truly entered a new market regime, or whether this is just the hopium before the inevitable crash.

💸 Flash Crash? More Like Block Reward Boost…

During the October 10th market crash, heightened market activity caused blocks on Solana to become saturated. For our validator, this meant earning large block rewards, demonstrating how exposure to block reward revenue can increase staking APY in both bullish and bearish environments, given enough volatility.

While our validator H2O Nodes shares 90% of Jito Tips, it does not share priority fees, which constitute the majority of block rewards. Our upcoming validator RevTec, however, will share both Jito Tips and priority fees.

We analyzed the state of real economic value (REV) on Solana last month, during our livestream which highlighted the findings of our Q3 REV Report.

💪 Upgraded Hardware for Solana Validator

We forked over the money for a brand new server for the H2O Nodes Solana validator, moving from a 32-core AMD Epyc 9374F to a 64-core AMD Epyc 9575F. Those extra cores, combined with a max boost clock of up to 5 GHz, should ensure high performance running the Firedancer client for the coming years.

💣AWS Outage Highlights Bare Metal Advantage

The widely-covered AWS outage, and the fallout caused by it, highlighted how much  internet infrastructure, both in web2 and web3, relies on AWS. As a reminder, we run all of our validator infrastructure on our own servers, and don’t use cloud services.

🤝 Raiku Launch Partner

Raiku published an announcement highlighting H2O Nodes as a launch partner. Raiku's architecture empowers validators like us to monetize deterministic blockspace, creating sustainable non-MEV revenue for stakers while serving developers who demand execution guarantees. We’re looking forward to gaining hands-on experience with the Raiku Sidecar, to help us in our collective mission to make Solana the inevitable choice for internet capital markets.

🌴 IslandDAO

We visited IslandDAO in Mykonos for a week, meeting many builders, exploring the island, and giving a workshop about validator infrastructure and the economics of launching a validator on Solana. It was fantastic to present to such an engaged audience, and we’ll surely be going back to IslandDAOs in the future.

⚖️ SolanaGovernance.com

We vibe-coded a site to keep track of the ongoing Solana governance conversation. Led by Nick Almond at Jito Foundation, the goal is to align around key governance parameters, before having a mass signing event at the Breakpoint conference in December. (The key parameters being “what needs to go to a vote versus just a technical proposal”, and also “what should the quorum be for a governance vote?”)

For over two years we’ve helped co-organize the monthly validator community calls, and it’s good to see a community-led initiative to iron out some of the remaining issues around governance. You can expect us to see us supporting in the background.

💧 Sui Whitelabel Validators

We now have our third whitelabel validator customer on Sui.  In exchange for a fixed monthly fee in fiat, we fully manage validator operations on our own bare metal servers. If you’re interested in launching your own validator on Sui, or any other network, hit us up!

🤖 Developer Services

We continue to build out our developer services platform, which is already live at dev.h2o-nodes.com. Coming soon will be Sui RPCs, including the new gRPC and GraphQL interfaces. We’re also exploring how we can partner with leading developers in the space to offer useful APIs and other data services on Sui.

☕️ Espresso Testnet Launch

We’re live on Espresso’s testnet, Decaf, which runs on the Ethereum Sepolia testnet! In the coming months, we’ll gain more experience, and prepare us for the eventual mainnet launch. So far, the team has been very responsive and helpful, and the node operator discord channel is lively!

⛓️ Somnia Testnet Launch

We’ve also spun up a validator on the testnet of Somnia Network. After on month on testnet, we should be able to advance to their mainnet, which launched earlier this year. It’s good to take part in a high performance EVM chain, which has made some very impressive TPS numbers in testing, but also understands the value of a diversified operator set.

😈 Monad Mainnet Launch

After months of testnet, it’s almost time to launch the mainnet of Monad! We’re very excited to be part of what is undoubtedly the most anticipated L1 launch of the year. We’re especially interested to see how the liquid staking protocols shape up after launch, many of whom are now competing in the MEV space. As a reminder, we’ve invested in Kintsu, Fastlane, and aPriori. Fastlane in particular seems to be making strides integrating pieces of their client into the core Monad client.

Breakpoint is only 6 weeks away! Our whole team will be there: our co-founders Max and Daniel, our lawyer and shareholder Taiyo, and RevTec’s full stack dev Nariman. Reach out if you’ll be there! 👋

All the best,

-Max Sherwood, H2O Nodes Co-founder