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Mert Mumtaz left Coinbase to found Solana developer tools firm Helius in June 2022. But just a few months later FTX collapsed, taking the price of SOL down 60% with it.
Solana had soared to its all-time high of $260 a year earlier, in November 2021, thanks in part to its high-profile champion, billionaire FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried.
But when it became apparent SBF was headed to jail over the $8 billion fraud, many thought Solana might never recover. But if you think Mumtaz was worried about his fledgling company’s future, you’d be wrong.
“It kept going down,” Mumtaz, 29, tells Magazine during an interview in Singapore. “It hit $8 at one point and I still had zero doubts.”
For the developer, who had also worked for major Canadian banks before devoting himself to Solana, clearing out the bad actors actually seemed like a good thing. And while the blockchain had suffered a lot of bad publicity that year over chain halts, he also knew the spam problem had largely been addressed.
“People did not see it that way, because they thought that the chain was successful because of FTX,” he recalls.
“But since we were already building on it, our numbers were going up. So we were getting more developers week after week, month after month,” he says. “And I was like, ‘This is not true.’ And in fact, since we’re super technical, we saw that there were a bunch of improvements that were made to the network that actually made it much better than before.”
SBF’s departure had left an opening for a new high-profile Solana champion, and Mumtaz’s unshakeable conviction in the project made him the perfect candidate.
“It occurred to me that people have so many fundamental misunderstandings of how Solana works that somebody needs to go out on Twitter, which is where the discussion happens, and be like, ‘No, like, you’re wrong, and here are the facts to back this up.’”
“That’s when I started to sort of become a reply guy. And every time people would post something, I would just say, ‘Well, that’s incorrect. Here are the facts.’ And basically just kept doing that for… I mean, I still haven’t stopped.”
Trolling his way to success
Mumtaz looks a little gray today, having just survived four days of “food poisoning, the worst ever.” On X he’s been complaining about nicotine withdrawal, as his beloved Zyns aren’t legal in Singapore, and caffeine withdrawal after he gave up coffee.
He grins though and says about the posts: “I’m just trolling mostly.”
His trolling ability, combined with a sharp intellect and deep technical knowledge, has seen Mumtaz emerge as one of the biggest personalities on Crypto X. Over the past month he was crypto’s top key opinion later, ahead of influencer Ansem, Base builder Jesse Pollak and Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin.
At least some of Solana’s impressive turnaround since 2022 can be attributed to his incessant bull posting.
Mumtaz will fight anyone he believes is spreading bullshit about Solana — even challenging Edward Snowden to a verbal duel over his recent claim that Solana is centralized.
It’s been a quick rise to prominence given he only discovered Solana in 2021 while working at Coinbase. His early efforts talking up Solana when he had just a handful of followers caught the attention of contributor Armani Ferrante, the Solana Foundation and later the blockchain’s founder Anatoly “Toly” Yakovenko.
“Everybody from Solana started following me around that time, because, as a foundation, it’s a bad look to just go out and say a bunch of stuff like: ‘Our chain is better than yours’ and stuff, but I could do that. And so they appreciated that.”
Mert Mumtaz: More than just a Solana maxi
The best thing about Mumtaz is that while he definitely spends a lot of time talking up Solana, he’s not totally a one-eyed maxi and has invested in Cosmos chains, Monad and even Ethereum L2s.
“I also shit on Solana pretty frequently, which people kind of seem to miss, like I probably FUD Solana the most out of anybody I’m aware of,” he says.
“Fundamentally, I’m an engineer, and I care about the systems being better. I do think Solana is the best system, but it’s certainly not the only system, and it’s also not a perfect system,” he says.
He’s challenged the Solana Foundation for issuing misleading stats about Solana’s nodes and Ethereum’s Nakamoto coefficient score. He doesn’t like the widely derided “network extensions” term for Solana L2s.This week he suggested a podcaster grill Toly about whether Solana has a “moat in a world where every chain is fast, scalable and cheap.”
He’s targeted accounts that promote dubious statistics, like the chart suggesting that Solana has 100 million monthly active addresses (critics argue the stats are inflatedand comprise mostlybots).
When Altcoin Daily posted a chart showing Solana has 5 million daily active users, herepostedit, saying, “No, it doesn’t. everyone fuck off with this useless stat.”
He’s also taken aim at Solana’s famously terrible block explorer and recently posted about Solana’s ABI problem with “unreadable explorers, inconsistent stats, constantly broken ecosystem integrations (wallet histories, contract calls), etc.”
“Can someone help me understand why noone seems to give a fuck.”
He tells Magazine, “This is one of the things that Ethereum does much better than Solana.”
Mumtaz explains that Solana is optimized for efficiency, and coded in a way that looks like a “bunch of random hashes and strings” onchain and requires “a schema from the smart contract to decode it.”
But he says there’s no central place for people to publish their schemas. “And since a good chunk of the code is not open source, it’s very hard to understand what’s going on,” he says.
“Whereas EVM [Ethereum Virtual Machine] it’s much simpler, like Etherscan has basically all these people actually publish it there, and we just don’t have that same process on Solana. But it is a solvable problem. And so this is kind of what I was trying to say earlier, which is that Solana works, but it needs a lot of tooling to make it truly great, which is why Helius exists.”
Helius is becoming as important to Solana as Consensys is to Ethereum, and it fulfills a similar role.
So who is Mert Mumtaz?
Born in Istanbul Turkey, the family moved to Niagara Falls when Mumtaz was a kid after his dad started to become alarmed at the influence of conservative strongman leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
“I actually went to the same high school that James Cameron went to,” he says of Stamford Collegiate in Niagara Falls. “It’s like, the worst high school in Canada by ranking.” Mumtaz also notes he went to the same university as Elon Musk, and the same highly selective math program as longevity expert Peter Attia.
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Well-built, Mumtaz devoted a lot of time to rugby, football, wrestling and kickboxing and not much time to study.
“I was very into combat sports, which is where I used to get my anger out, let’s say, instead of Twitter,” he explains. He initially planned to attend Queens University on a sports scholarship but later realized:
“If I want to be an entrepreneur and build things and, you know, use my brain. I should probably not be getting hit in the head too much.”
He went into more detail on this story on X last week, attributing his change of heart to getting his ass kicked by “tiny ass dudes in robes with books” in the game Skyrim.
“I got rekt so hard and rage quit and then had a hilarious realization: knowledge is much more useful than literally anything else on earth.”
Instead of MMA and rugby, he refocused his attention on math and science and ended up studying for an engineering degree. He was accepted into the elite Apple Math applied mathematics program, which only accepts 30 people a year.
“That’s actually where I met my co-founders for Helius, Liam (Vovk) and Nick (Pennie).”
The three became fast friends, and Vovk and Mumtaz spent five years as roommates. Mumtaz’s plan to pursue a PhD in Physics got sidetracked by a year-long internship at Blackberry. Watching the tech company roll out new models and updates made him eager to have an impact in the real world instead of academia or abstract math.
“I just liked the approach of shipping things that people use, it’s much more exciting than doing a PhD in science. And so when I came back, I basically just soft quit school.”
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In his spare time he’d try to build stuff, like his attempt to build an early ChatGPT system that turned into a keyboard autocomplete. Ethereum was picking up speed around that time, and although he fielded offers from projects doing things like “building the education system, but on blockchains,” none of the use cases seemed that inspiring.
Instead, he ended up working for three of the five biggest banks in Canada in cybersecurity, trading infrastructure, digital payments and ATM withdrawal systems.
He was building payment systems for tech entrepreneur Michele Romanow’s Clearbanc when the penny finally dropped about crypto in early 2021.
“There was a day where I had to build a system that sends money to Australia from Canada, and it was really inefficient because it had to jump through all these jurisdictions,” he says. “I was like, ‘Why don’t we just use something like Ethereum to make this much easier and just save everybody money and headaches?’ And basically, people just did not believe in crypto.”
“So I got upset with that way of thinking.”
Mert joins Coinbase and discovers Solana
He ditched the world of banking and joined Coinbase as an engineer on the platform team about “a week before it listed” in April 2021.
“When I joined, it was still startup vibes, and relatively early, and most of the bull run hadn’t really happened yet,” he recalls. “It wasn’t until Coinbase went public where everything started going insane.”
During his time at the exchange, he started researching crypto projects in more depth, looking at Polkadot and Avalanche before Solana caught his eye. He says it appealed because “it was built as a communication system like Toly’s background is cell towers and stuff like that.”
Given his own communications engineering background, “I was like this actually makes a lot of sense. And nobody else is tackling it this way. So I just started building stuff on Solana in my own time,” he says.
“At one point I’d built most of the NFT bots that the ecosystem used.”
But trying to integrate Solana into Coinbase’s systems underlined just how far ahead Ethereum was in developer tools and with Etherscan. On the other hand, competitors had overtaken Ethereum in scaling potential.
“The thought I had was ‘OK we can either wait like five, six years for the Ethereum roadmap to settle itself out until things start scaling, or we can build on Solana today’.”
“And so I had that bet, and obviously nobody else believed at that time, but I was like, yeah, so I’m just going to start a company that helps solve the developer problems on Solana, because I face them every day myself, building stuff. And so I quit Coinbase and started Helius.”
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He roped in Vovk and Pennie, who were working at TikTok and AWS, respectively. They didn’t know the first thing about Solana at the time, but they were quick students. Although they were brought on as engineers, they became equal partners in the business.
To grow Helius further, he hit the road to drum up VC investment.
“Basically all of them said no. It was either ‘Solana is too small, that’s not where the developers are.’ Or ‘I don’t see this as being a big business.’”
But again, his propensity for getting attention on Twitter came in handy. One of his early viral posts was a complaint about mentally incompetent 80-year-olds running the country. This caught the eye of a VC who started following him. He reached out while he was raising money, and the VC introduced him to New York-based early-stage crypto VC firm Reciprocal.
“And Reciprocal already had the thesis that Solana would need something like this… And so they’re like, ‘yeah, we’ll invest’ and then I was able to put a round together and raise a seed round for a Helius.”
Friendly and relaxed in real life
In the hour or so of our interview, Mumtaz comes across as a low-key but friendly guy. On X, he seems a lot more feisty, but he says that’s mainly because people make a bunch of outrageous claims online.
“It really depends on the stimuli that triggers my response. It just so happens that in real life, people don’t say blatantly ridiculous stuff as much as they do on Twitter. But if I hear that in real life, I’ll also kind of act the same.”
Despite getting into daily conflicts he’s yet to have any legal dramas, or get into any real trouble.
“Maybe one case is like, back in the day, when I called out that Polygon was paying people to use the chain with all these grants and stuff,” he says. “Then everybody from that ecosystem got mad including all the founders and stuff.”
He says he’s since made peace with Polygon and “we’re now friends” but adds Helius the company has never got dragged into the drama.
“It’s just like super violent disagreements from, you know, other ecosystems, let’s say, but never from the company. I think my investors, when they first invested, they weren’t expecting me to be like, tweeting the way I do, and so they were probably a bit nervous.”
“But I’ve actually, surprisingly, never got in trouble.”
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Andrew Fenton
Based in Melbourne, Andrew Fenton is a journalist and editor covering cryptocurrency and blockchain. He has worked as a national entertainment writer for News Corp Australia, on SA Weekend as a film journalist, and at The Melbourne Weekly.