A Solana power broker crosses chains: Helius CEO Mert Mumtaz joins the council that runs the NEAR Foundation

One of the best-known names in Solana's infrastructure world is taking a governance seat at a rival ecosystem. The NEAR Foundation announced on Thursday that Mert Mumtaz, co-founder and chief executive of Helius, has joined its Council, which oversees the foundation and its most significant decisions, The Block reported. He will help steer product strategy, ecosystem growth and governance as NEAR pushes what it calls private onchain markets, and he will serve as a judge for the NEAR Hackathon, which runs from November 1 to 14.

Helius supplies the plumbing behind much of Solana: RPC nodes, data streaming, transaction delivery and validators used by Phantom, Jupiter, Coinbase and Bitwise. Crypto Briefing said Mumtaz worked as a software engineer at Coinbase, BlackBerry, Shutterstock, Scotiabank and Clearco before founding the company.

The connection to NEAR runs through NEAR Intents, the protocol that routes trades across chains. According to the foundation, Mumtaz was an early user who saw its promise before most of the industry noticed. The Block said NEAR Intents has handled more than $33 billion in all-time volume and holds more than $160 million in confidential value locked, but that a flaw in its deposit and withdrawal systems led to a $3.8 million exploit earlier in October, disrupting transfers across 11 networks before it was patched, with the team promising full compensation.

Polosukhin said Mumtaz's "conviction, technical depth, and direct approach will be a great asset" to the council. The other members are Polosukhin, Diogo Mónica of Anchorage Digital, former foundation COO Chris Donovan and NEAR One founder Bowen Wang.