The Solana infrastructure leader and privacy advocate joins NEAR Foundation’s governing body to help bring privacy to onchain markets and will judge the NEAR Hackathon launching November 1
Today, the NEAR Foundation announced that Mert Mumtaz, CEO of Helius, has joined the NEAR Foundation Council. The Council is NEAR Foundation's governing body, responsible for oversight of the Foundation and its most significant decisions. He will also serve as a judge for the upcoming NEAR Hackathon, starting November 1.
Mert joins current Council members Illia Polosukhin, Co-Founder of NEAR Protocol; Diogo Mónica, Co-founder of Anchorage Digital; Chris Donovan, former COO of NEAR Foundation; and Bowen Wang, former CEO of NEAR One.
At Helius, Mert leads, and will continue to lead, the build-out of the infrastructure that teams including Phantom, Jupiter, Coinbase, and Bitwise use to build on Solana, from RPC nodes and data streaming to transaction delivery and validators. Mert is also a prominent voice in crypto's privacy renaissance, particularly around Zcash and shielded payments, where he has argued that people should be able to keep their money encrypted and still spend it anywhere, which aligns with NEAR Intents’ vision of universal, private markets.
Mert has repeatedly proven he can spot where the industry is going long before it arrives. He was an early user of NEAR Intents in December 2024, and a year later pointed out that it was already powering Zcash swaps, Ledger Live, and Infinex at a time when, as he put it, few people were aware of it. He has since called NEAR the market of markets for its role as industry-wide infrastructure connecting chains and liquidity. On the Council, Mert will bring market judgment and an operator’s technical rigor to the NEAR Foundation’s governance, including how the Foundation supports product development and go-to-market strategy, the key areas where he has publicly said NEAR has the most room to grow.
Mert has already completed work that connects NEAR to other ecosystems around it. Helius listed NEAR on Solana through Orb, and Mert has argued that this cycle's progress spans Solana, Zcash, and NEAR, and that the three ecosystems should build on each other.
NEAR is building where markets across every chain meet, for people and AI agents alike, with confidentiality as a core primitive. NEAR Intents has processed more than $33 billion in all-time volume, with confidential TVL now over $160 million. near.com is confidential by default. Users trade across chains from an account they control and keep their positions and history to themselves.
Mert Joins the NEAR Hackathon Judging Panel
Mert will also join the judging panel for the upcoming NEAR Hackathon, a two-week build sprint on NEAR’s stack, including NEAR Intents and NEAR AI Cloud. Development runs November 1 to 14, with results announced by November 18. Mert judges alongside Illia Polosukhin; Eddy Lazzarin of a16z crypto; Avichal Garg of Electric Capital; Kain Warwick of Synthetix and Infinex; Haseeb Qureshi of Dragonfly; and Stepan Gershuni of cyber•Fund, with Claude Code and Codex reviewing as AI judges.
“Mert is a rare force in crypto, with a unique ability to be both correct and vocal about it,” said Illia Polosukhin, Co-Founder of NEAR Protocol. “He was an early NEAR Intents adopter and advocate before most of the industry caught on, and the whole NEAR ecosystem and I personally have benefited from his candor and support. Mert's conviction, technical depth, and direct approach will be a great asset for the NEAR Foundation Council as we work to bring private assets and markets to every chain. His sharp perspective and shared belief in the vision will be a major advantage for NEAR in shaping what we build next.”
