Helius CEO joins NEAR council weeks after a $3.8m Intents exploit

Mert Mumtaz, chief executive of Helius, joined the NEAR Foundation Council. Helius runs Solana infrastructure, the RPC nodes, data streaming and transaction delivery behind Phantom, Jupiter, Coinbase and Bitwise, so a Solana operator now sits inside the body overseeing NEAR's foundation and its larger decisions. The node an application talks to is his business, and that is the experience he brings.

“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”

— Illia Polosukhin, Co-founder, NEAR

Who sits on the council

He joins Illia Polosukhin, who co-founded NEAR, Diogo Mónica of Anchorage Digital, former NEAR Foundation chief operating officer Chris Donovan and NEAR One founder Bowen Wang. His remit covers product strategy, ecosystem growth and governance, and he judges the NEAR hackathon running from 1 to 14 November. A council seat at a foundation is unpaid influence over which projects get funded and which standards get adopted.

The product he adopted early is NEAR Intents, which has processed $33bn of volume since launch and holds more than $160m of confidential total value locked. That pool equals 75% of the $213.1m on the whole NEAR chain, so most of the chain's locked value sits inside one product.

How far apart the chains are

The two chains sit far apart. Solana holds $5.9bn of total value locked against NEAR's $213.1m, 27.7 times more, and SOL's market capitalisation of $61.06bn runs 9.7 times NEAR's $6.3bn. The hire runs from the larger chain to the smaller one, and the smaller one pays in a seat.

NEAR Intents patched a $3.8m exploit in early October, which is 2.4% of the confidential pool it holds. Polosukhin framed the appointment around bringing private assets and markets to every chain, and a bug inside a private market costs reputation as well as funds.

NEAR has had a strange year. We measured it in September, when the token was up 211% on the year with the entire move packed into a single month. Solana spent the same period shipping engineering changes, including the block time cut this month.

What settles by November

Three things settle by the end of the hackathon. Whether Intents volume keeps compounding after the exploit. Whether the confidential pool grows past $160m. And whether a Solana operator on a NEAR council produces anything an outsider can measure, rather than a line in a press release.

Informational material, not investment advice. Chain and market figures were read on 15 October 2026, and a council seat changes governance rather than the numbers underneath it.