Helius CEO Mert Mumtaz Joins NEAR Foundation Council

The NEAR Foundation Council, the governing body that oversees the nonprofit behind NEAR Protocol, has appointed Mert Mumtaz, chief executive of the Solana infrastructure firm Helius, to its ranks. The foundation announced the appointment on Oct. 15, 2026.

Mumtaz will contribute to product strategy, ecosystem growth and governance as NEAR pushes its private onchain markets vision, and he will serve as a judge for the NEAR Hackathon, which the announcement says begins Nov. 1. He is an early NEAR Intents user, and he has called NEAR "the market of markets."

A Solana Infrastructure CEO Takes a Seat at NEAR

Helius builds the infrastructure that teams including Phantom, Jupiter, Coinbase and Bitwise use to build on Solana, spanning RPC nodes, data streaming, transaction delivery and validators. The appointment places an executive from Solana's tooling layer inside the governance of a separate Layer 1 network, and he framed the two as complementary rather than competing.

"There is no world in which crypto succeeds but distinct markets are gatekept exclusively through CEXes," Mumtaz said in the announcement. "We already have that and it's called TradFi. For crypto to win, we need connected, unstoppable liquidity at planetary scale. A market of markets. Neither Solana, Zcash, or Bitcoin can win on their own, we must work together. And NEAR is how."

Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of NEAR Protocol, said Mumtaz was an early NEAR Intents adopter and advocate "before most of the industry caught on," and credited his "candor and support." He called Mumtaz "a rare force in crypto, with a unique ability to be both correct and vocal about it."

Mumtaz joins current council members Polosukhin; Diogo Monica, co-founder of Anchorage Digital; Chris Donovan, former COO of NEAR Foundation; and Bowen Wang, founder of NEAR One. The council oversees the foundation's governance and major strategic decisions, comparable to a board of directors. NEAR Foundation is a Switzerland-based nonprofit foundation, the same legal structure used by projects including Ethereum and Polkadot.

NEAR Intents Has Processed Over $33 Billion

The announcement pairs the appointment with the cross-chain numbers NEAR is selling: NEAR Intents, its cross-chain swap product, has processed more than $33 billion in all-time volume, with confidential total value locked now above $160 million.

The same release also cites "$30B+ in cross-chain volume" for near.com, its unified front end. That is a different measure from the $33 billion all-time figure for NEAR Intents, and the release does not reconcile the two.

near.com offers one account across 35 or more chains, with confidential cross-chain swaps, perpetual futures, tokenized real-world assets and yield products, per the announcement. It lists integrations with Abound, Brave Nightly, the Government of Bermuda, OpenMind and Venice AI.

Hackathon Judging Runs Nov. 1 to 14

Mumtaz will judge the NEAR Hackathon, a two-week build sprint on NEAR's stack including NEAR Intents and NEAR AI Cloud. Development runs Nov. 1 to 14, 2026, with results announced by Nov. 18.

He judges alongside 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.

What the seat changes for users of either network is not something the announcement sets out, and the terms of the appointment were not part of it. The figures to watch are the ones NEAR supplied with the news: growth in NEAR Intents volume and the confidential TVL figure, at a time when the person helping steer part of that strategy also runs a company serving Solana's builders.