Mert Mumtaz | Building for Builders | The Curious Learners Ep. 39

Hi everyone. My guest today is Mert Mumtaz. He is the co-founder and CEO at Helius, which is a developer platform for the Blockchain ecosystem. Mert is not new to crypto. Prior to starting Helius, he spent years at Coinbase building different products across payments and others. Helius currently supports the Solana ecosystem and Mert has been a big supporter of the ecosystem since its early days.

Mert and I had a fascinating discussion about the state of Blockchain, Solana vs. other networks, upcoming L1 ecosystems and of course his plans for Helius. Below are some highlights of the episode. Please give it a listen to hear a great conversation.

Where does your conviction for Solana come from?
Its unique tech aspect, its different approach to Blockchain design and scaling and of course the strong developer community.

What is your view on use cases of Blockchain?
Payments is an obvious use case and what Blockchain offers is a 10x improvement over traditional wire systems.  Another big area is token incentivized physical infrastructure network with examples in wireless networks, maps, energy grid, etc.

What is a one-liner for Helius?
Helius enables developers to build crypto powered applications in a frictionless way.

What is the problem that Helius solves for builders?
For any software development process, there is naturally a gap between having an idea to build something and actually executing it. In crypto, that gap is wider and is full of frictions due to additional complexity around models of Blockchains, RPC nodes, etc. Helius shortens the gap and bridges ideas to execution.

How did the experience at Coinbase lead to realisation of the need for a product like Helius?
It was a natural conclusion during the Solana expansion of Coinbase. Many of the resources available for the Ethereum ecosystem (e.g. Etherscan, APIs, etc.) didn't exist for Solana, which I was working to build at Coinbase.

What is the mix of projects on Solana?
Payments is a big space and developing fast. Intersection of NFTs and DeFi is also interesting. This is in particular due to compression, which is a tool that enables to mint large number of NFTs at minimal cost. The one I am most interested is physical infrastructure networks.

What is your expansion plan at Helius in terms of other Blockchain networks?
Our vision at Helius is to build specialized infrastructure for high throughput and scalable L1 networks. Solana is the most scalable one and we will expand to others.

What new products are on the way?
Three that I can disclose: 1) Blockchain explorer called X-Ray, which makes it super easy to read and make sense of transactions on Blockchain. 2) RPC 2.0, which re-designs the archiving system on the back-end. 3) A new product called Geyser VM that allows streaming data directly from the validator by using Geyser plugins.

Where does transformation come from in crypto in the next 3-5 years?
Payments is the killer app for crypto. Crypto is a much better way of facilitating payments and the problem is regulatory uncertainty around stablecoins and the differences in the regulatory environment across regions will determine how geographically distributed it will be. Others are physical infrastructure networks as mentioned and decentralized infrastructure (e.g. storage).

What are you most curious about?
1) Chat GPT - mind blowing how impressive it is! -> Stephen Wolfram's article
2) How data centers work and whether there is a way to improve the industry (hint: using Blockchain)
3) Storytelling! -> As engineers, you often neglect something like storytelling, but have been trying to improve that skill.