Helius CEO Joins NEAR Foundation Board to Contribute to Product Strategy and Governance

NEAR Foundation announced that Mert Mumtaz, CEO of Solana infrastructure firm Helius, has joined the foundation’s board of directors. He will assist in advancing product strategy, ecosystem growth and governance, while supporting NEAR’s expansion into the privacy-focused on-chain market. The board is responsible for overseeing the foundation and its major decisions. Mumtaz will also serve as a judge for the NEAR Hackathon held from November 1 to 14. Helius offers RPC nodes, data feeds, transaction relaying and validator services, with its infrastructure used by teams including Phantom, Jupiter, Coinbase and Bitwise. An early user of NEAR Intents, Mumtaz once referred to the protocol as a "market of markets". According to the NEAR Foundation, NEAR Intents has accumulated over $33 billion in total trading volume, with its privacy-focused total value locked (TVL) exceeding $160 million. Other board 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.