The council includes NEAR Protocol co-founder Illia Polosukhin, Anchorage Digital co-founder Diogo Mónica, former NEAR Foundation COO Chris Donovan and NEAR One founder Bowen Wang.
Thu 15 Oct 2026 · 09:03 EDT · 2 min read
In Technology
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NEAR Foundation has added Helius CEO Mert Mumtaz to its council to help develop private onchain markets and connect blockchain liquidity, according to an Oct. 15 announcement.
Mumtaz is the co-founder of Helius, which builds the infrastructure behind applications and services on Solana. Helius now provides RPC infrastructure, historical data, streaming, transaction delivery and validator services for Solana developers, with customers including Phantom, Jupiter, Coinbase and Bitwise.
Before launching the company, Mumtaz worked as a software engineer at Coinbase, BlackBerry, Shutterstock, Scotiabank and Clearco.
The appointment will see Mumtaz help oversee NEAR Foundation’s product strategy, ecosystem development and governance as it works to connect liquidity across blockchain networks.
The Canadian software engineer and crypto entrepreneur is also set to judge the NEAR Hackathon, which will run from Nov. 1 to 14 and focus on projects built using NEAR’s technology stack, including NEAR Intents and NEAR AI Cloud.
Mumtaz joins council members Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of NEAR Protocol; Diogo Mónica, co-founder of Anchorage Digital; Chris Donovan, former chief operating officer of NEAR Foundation; and Bowen Wang, founder of NEAR One.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Estefano Gomez. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
