Helius co-founder and CEO Mert Mumtaz has joined the NEAR Foundation Council, the body that governs the Switzerland-registered organization backing the NEAR protocol. The appointment places one of Solana's most prominent infrastructure executives inside the governance structure of a competing layer-1 network.

Mumtaz leads Helius, a company that builds developer APIs, RPC infrastructure and tooling for the Solana ecosystem. His new seat on the NEAR Foundation Council signals a formal governance role rather than an operational one: the council oversees the foundation's strategy, treasury decisions and ecosystem allocation for NEAR, a proof-of-stake blockchain that positions itself around sharding and usability.

What does the appointment change?

The move gives NEAR direct access to an operator who has scaled developer infrastructure on one of the most active smart-contract platforms. Helius supplies the plumbing that Solana applications rely on — RPC endpoints, transaction parsing, webhooks and analytics — and Mumtaz has built a public profile around articulating Solana's technical roadmap to developers and investors.

For the NEAR Foundation, adding a council member with deep infrastructure experience aligns with its stated focus on growing developer activity and chain abstraction. For Helius, the role creates an unusual cross-ecosystem arrangement: the CEO of a Solana-native infrastructure firm now holds formal governance influence at a rival foundation.

Such cross-appointments remain rare in the layer-1 sector, where foundation councils typically draw from ecosystem-native founders, investors or researchers. The closest parallel is executives holding advisory seats across portfolio companies, but a full council seat at a competing protocol foundation stands out as a structural outlier.

Who is Mert Mumtaz?

Mumtaz co-founded Helius and has served as its chief executive through the company's growth into one of Solana's core infrastructure providers. He has become one of the most visible technical commentators on Solana, frequently addressing network performance, validator economics and developer experience in public forums.

At NEAR, he joins a foundation council that operates from Switzerland, a jurisdiction that hosts several major blockchain foundations. The council model separates protocol governance from the corporate entities building on the chain.

What happens next?

The appointment takes effect within the foundation's existing governance cycle, and Mumtaz's first council decisions will indicate whether NEAR intends to lean on his infrastructure experience for specific developer-tooling initiatives. Both Helius and the NEAR Foundation will need to clarify how the CEO manages conflicts between the two ecosystems as NEAR's roadmap advances.