Helius CEO joins NEAR Foundation Council, participating in product strategy and governance efforts.

October 15: The NEAR Foundation announced that Mert Mumtaz, CEO of Solana infrastructure company Helius, has joined the foundation's council to help advance product strategy, ecosystem growth, and governance, supporting NEAR's expansion into privacy-focused on-chain markets. The council oversees the foundation and its major decisions. Mumtaz will also serve as a judge for the NEAR Hackathon taking place from November 1 to 14.

Helius provides RPC nodes, data streaming, transaction transmission, and validator services, with its infrastructure used by teams such as Phantom, Jupiter, Coinbase, and Bitwise. Mumtaz is an early user of NEAR Intents and has called the protocol a "market of markets."

According to disclosures from the NEAR Foundation, NEAR Intents has surpassed $33 billion in cumulative trading volume, with privacy TVL exceeding $160 million. Other council members include NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin, Anchorage Digital co-founder Diogo Mónica, former NEAR Foundation COO Chris Donovan, and NEAR One founder Bowen Wang.