NEAR Foundation adds Helius CEO Mert Mumtaz to its Council

Mert Mumtaz, the CEO of Solana infrastructure firm Helius, has joined the NEAR Foundation Council. That council oversees the foundation and signs off on its most consequential decisions. So one of Solana’s loudest voices now helps steer a rival ecosystem’s governance. Who Mumtaz is and what the council does Mumtaz co-founded Helius, a company that sells high-performance RPC services and related tooling for the Solana network. RPC stands for remote procedure call. Think of it as the switchboard between apps and the blockchain. When a wallet checks your balance or a trading app submits a transaction, an RPC node is usually handling that request behind the scenes. Helius has grown into one of the more recognized names in that plumbing business. The company raised $9.5 million in a Series A round. It has also acquired Light Protocol, a deal aimed at strengthening privacy features across Helius’s product lineup. Helius has additionally drawn backing through an investment led by Foundation Capital. The NEAR Foundation, for its part, is a nonprofit that supports development of the NEAR Protocol ecosystem. Its Council works as an oversight body, separate from the foundation’s executive tea...