Our guest this week is Mert Mumtaz, Co-founder & CEO of Helius, a vertically integrated developer platform offering a suite of tools to help easily build products on Solana. Mert joins Brian Friel to clear up common misconceptions about Solana, shares the latest opportunities for developers, and dives deep into state compression, which reduces the amount of on-chain storage required to store NFTs, resulting in lower costs for creators and buyers by up to 100 times. State compression on Solana is already being leveraged by projects like Dialect, Drip.haus, and Helium to help scale their projects.

Show Notes:

01:10 - Origin Story and background

05:08 - How he started on Solana

07:45 - How Helius began

11:27 - Misconceptions about Solana

18:01 - What is he most excited about on Solana

23:03 - How is Helius working with DePin

25:34 - Opportunities for Developers on Solana

32:15 - A builder he admires

Full Transcript:

Brian (00:06):

Hey everyone and welcome to the Zeitgeist, the show where we highlight the founders, developers, and designers who are pushing the Web3 space forward. I'm Brian Friel, developer relations at Phantom, and I'm super excited to introduce my guest, the man who in Solana needs no introduction. Mert Montaz, the founder and CEO of Helius. Mert, welcome to the show.

Mert (00:25):

Thank you for having me, Brian.

Brian (00:26):

I've been looking forward to having a conversation with you here for a while. I don't know if you remember this, but way back in the day, I was getting my start on Solana by writing articles on Twitter, dev related articles, and you were one of the first people that took my article and said, hey, I'm an engineer at Coinbase. I can actually vouch that this is legitimate. And that actually got me in front of Chase Barker and everything. I don't know if you remember that interaction, but it's been a long time that I've seen you on Twitter.

Mert (00:54):

I do remember it.

Brian (00:55):

Thank you for that because that got me my stardom of three. Maybe that'd be an interesting place to start is I'd love to learn a little bit more about you. I know you were, previously before getting involved with Solana, you were at Coinbase. Can you share a little bit about your journey, what your background is and what led you to Solana?

Mert (01:10):

Yeah, absolutely. First of all, I do remember that interaction. I think it was a medium article about it was either voting or incremental counter, maybe a peanut butter sandwich or something.

Brian (01:21):

Yeah. It was like a simple app.

Mert (01:22):

Yeah, it was actually quite good. I was super impressed with it. I wish people kept producing those. I think we need more brine blog posts. Yeah. I guess maybe a brief intro of how I got started. I majored in math and communications engineering, communications engineering being satellites and signals and stuff like that. And I actually got to work at Blackberry as an intern. And so I got to see some pretty interesting engineering challenges at my earlier years about cloud infrastructure. I was on the team that ran the cloud for BBM, for example, which handled a lot of volume until it died, of course. Yeah, I mean after that I worked at the big banks in Canada, Canada's run by five big banks and I worked at three of those in some weird order where I did cybersecurity, I did payment systems, ATM withdrawals and stuff like that.

(02:11):

And I then joined a startup that got acquired, Shutterstock. It was about digital advertising and stuff like that. I'm sure some people are familiar with Shutterstock. And then I worked at Clear Bank on the treasury team where we were in charge of payment rails and stuff for funding entrepreneurs. And then we had this situation where we needed to send money to Australia and I needed to write the code that would handle doing that. And we met with a bunch of these vendors and stuff and it was all super complex for some reason that I didn't understand, you had to do these hops through various jurisdictions and stuff like that. And I was like, I mean you could probably just use USDC or something. And people just thought that was a scam. And at that point I was like, I wonder what the actual truth is here.

(02:55):

I did some digging and I was like, this is obviously not a scam, not even close. And in fact, it seems super interesting. I did a brief look into crypto in university where I thought I was maybe too academic and you need a PhD or something to do anything meaningful. Obviously quite wrong, but that was my first intro. And then a few weeks after that I was working at Coinbase. Actually it was interesting because I joined them slightly before they went public. And so they still kind of had the startup ethos and it was super fun working there and got to learn and build and talk with a bunch of really bright people. And that's obviously doing research on different blockchains. Obviously Coinbase is very EVM centric. Some times were good, some times we're bad. And somewhere in that line I found Solana and I just started digging around posting stuff, publishing stuff. And I really liked the approach that Solana had taken to be the pragmatic approach. I'm sure you hear this word a lot, but the practicality of the ecosystem as well as the ethos really resonated with me.

(03:52):

And the community was also pretty cool. You actually just mentioned Chase talking to you about something you posted. That was also my experience. Whenever I would posted something, Armani or Chase would hype me up and I was like, okay, that's pretty cool. And yeah, I mean it kind of just took off from there.

Brian (04:07):

Yeah. I love that framing of the pragmatic chain and you actually having that experience at a big bank just saying, why don't we just use USDC? It's settled in 400 milliseconds or whatever. And Solana really, I think, is the best example of that. That's pretty poetic that you found your way there.

Mert (04:23):

Mm-hmm.

Brian (04:23):

I remember a time though when you first were posting on Twitter, it was mostly around trying to help others understand what was happening on chain. And you mentioned Coinbase, very EVM centric. I think a lot of us who worked in crypto at the time, it was just EVMs the only game in town. And if you thought differently, that was just weird or a lot of people it didn't make sense. And I think my experience, one of the biggest barriers to getting people familiar with Solana was just wrapping their head around the mental model of just how stuff works on chain. It's just inherently different. Can you talk a little bit about that, how you got your start? What were you doing when you were writing these articles and helping others understand what was going on on chain? What did you have to build, what were you teaching yourself at that time?

Mert (05:07):

Yeah, that's a good point. Most people actually don't really know that unless they were early like you. At first what I would do, this was kind of during the peak kind of start of NFT season on Solana and basically a lot of influencer types or people who I don't think were very intellectually honest would post some sort of claim about, oh, the price of the NFT is going down because the price of Solana is going up. This is obvious and stuff like that. And I thought to myself, there's no way the markets are that efficient for JPEGs, right. There's other stuff there. If people were botting these NFTs and getting a high concentration on maybe dumping on retail and doing other sketchy stuff. And so I would just write scripts, goal length scripts or JavaScript scripts, whatever, and analyze the data. This is before any data analytics existed, really like Solana FM or I mean, Solana FM was there, but they did regular indexing, Solana floor and stuff.

(06:09):

Flip side, Nance, none of these actually covered Solana. I would just do it and then I would just write my findings in a Twitter thread with some charts and stuff. And I did that pretty regularly. I did it for a bunch of different stuff, including some upcoming projects in terms of gaming and where the potential is. And somewhere along the line after being armed with that knowledge of just doing it for a consistent amount of time, I came across a lot of people on crypto Twitter just really making unsubstantiated claims about Solana and its architecture and its scaling plan and all this stuff. And I guess I was in somewhat of a unique position where I was actually still at Coinbase at the time and somebody would post something and I had relatively okay knowledge of EVM, but also pretty good knowledge of Solana.

(06:56):

And so I'd usually be able to tell, okay, this is just not true what this person posted. Why is nobody correcting them? And it's because nobody actually just really knew both ecosystems that well. And sometimes in internal Coinbase chats, this would come up and people would be like, that is wrong. And I'd be like, yeah, that is wrong. Why aren't we doing something about this? And I kind of just started yelling at the people who were just lying or maybe spreading knowledge that was not grounded in truth, let's say. And I just never stopped doing that. And turns out crypto Twitter is full of these people, and so I never-

Brian (07:29):

Yeah. Your job's never done.

Mert (07:30):

Exactly.

Brian (07:32):

Is it fair to say that you arming yourself with this knowledge, you had to actually build the tools you needed just to understand what's going on-chain. Was this the start of Helius and essentially what you guys now offer? And maybe you can talk a little bit about that, how Helius began.

Mert (07:45):

Yeah, 100%. That's exactly right. The most common problem I ran across was when you're looking at on-chain data, the data is super cryptic, right. The instruction data is bortion coded or something. And unless you knew the schema of how it was encoded or maybe the idea which, especially in NFTs, in DeFi, it's not too bad, but especially in NFTs and other non-DeFi use cases, nobody has any idea what the on chain data looks like. And so I would have to hard code some weird methods, maybe parse logs, but also reverse engineer based on discriminators. Or I would even try to brute force it sometimes, which actually kind of worked. I would go on Magic Eden, and you would know this is before Magic Eden's programs were more readable. This is the first version. I would check the app layer. I would go to magiceden.io and I would see, okay, this NFT is listed for 20 SOL or something.

(08:38):

And then I would try a bunch of different decodings until I got that answer. And then I would do that with a bunch of different ones and I'd be like, okay, this is clearly the discriminator that I need to use. And so I would do that. I also did a bunch, go to the network tab, inspect source, and then dig through the entire minify JavaScript, unminify it, see the schema and try to use that schema when trying to decode the data and stuff. And I was like, this is bananas. This should not be done. And basically that's kind of where Helius came from and the first iteration of Helius was like, okay, we need to make on chain data read about Solana because it's particularly impossible. And then along the way, once we started doing that and talking to customers, it seemed like quite a few people were having other problems, especially around RPCs, which was surprising 'cause I thought RPCs were kind of okay, but after digging into it, it turns out that wasn't really the case.

(09:28):

And then you run into all sorts of other issues like streaming data on chain, at least in an inexpensive and reliable way. Solana has this problem with web sockets where you might lose data. Yeah, I mean just talking to customers just found a bunch of problems. And Helius is essentially now there to be this vertically integrated developer platform on Solana to essentially just help developers succeed on Solana. And we're not necessarily bound to Solana, but basically my philosophy on this is that I want crypto to succeed. I mean obviously we're all here because we're interested in crypto and believe in crypto’s future. If you start from first principles there, I think given the options out there today, Solana's our essentially best shot at executing that vision. Obviously a lot of people disagree with that, but it's something I believe in. And so then my thought process, okay, how do we get more people to build on Solana so that we can have a better crypto future?

Brian (10:19):

No, I totally agree with that. I think that's been our ticket on Phantom as well, where it's like most of Phantom came from EVM folks and I think a lot of us independently kind of had this realization of we want crypto to succeed. Pragmatically thinking, what am I going to get my parents or my friend to use today? How are we realistically going to scale this thing in the next couple years? Solana also right now is the most pragmatic approach to doing that. I think before we jump in a little bit more to Helius in particular, what you guys offer and what you guys are up to, I kind want to take a moment just to talk maybe broadly about Solana because I think you are one of the most well known vocal defenders of Solana where there is a lot out there that's just blatantly wrong and you not only technically know how to rebut it, but you take the time and the energy to be out there and educating people. I want to know a little bit for where you sit at Helius, what you see right now, what would you say are some of the biggest misconceptions today about Solana that folks who maybe already know about crypto, maybe are already well versed in EVM, but maybe they just haven't gotten through to actually hear from somebody's boots on the ground. What would you tell them that they're misunderstanding about Solana?

Mert (11:27):

Maybe I'll take a more broad approach to answering this because it's kind of different segments, but in terms of maybe people from EVM, if you're already familiar with EVM and maybe you want to build on Solana and what are your kind of reservations, right. Some of the ones I've come across are, well, one, Rust is just hard to write. Solana has a diehard kind of fan base of Rust developers, but Rust is not easy. That is just a fact. Solidity, is somebody in high school could learn it easily, but Rust, I mean they'd be able to learn it, but I don't think it'd be easy. The concepts like lifetimes and for example, that stuff is not easy for somebody who wants to just prototype and maybe ship something. And so then you'll say, well, there's Anchor and stuff and Anchor is super helpful and probably my favorite tool on Solana, unless you know Rust, you're still going to be kind of flying blind and you know might need that to build your applications.

(12:17):

And if you're a determined developer, you'll get over that and then learn Rust anyways. But that friction alone is enough to deter a good amount of people is what I found. That's just one thing, and I know Foundation folks and Dev are working on this and there's some other teams, there's the Python seahorse stuff, there's a new type of Script One coming out. I think maybe there's even a Goaline One. It's also just a result of being early. Solana has really been around for two years, whereas EVM almost nine years now. It's hard to compare these things. That's one. And then two, and this is an interesting one, is developer optionality. As a developer, let's say at an entering focus from Coinbase, let's say you want to build a new product and you're deciding between EVM and Solana. Well, the obvious kind of elephant in the room is, okay, if Solana has a problem, you are kind of done, right?

(13:12):

You don't have any other options. You can't port your code base over anywhere else. Whereas if you are the EVM developer and you build on Polygon, you can just use main net Eth, maybe you can, with some effort, use any of the other L2's or maybe another EVM for it, something like that. It's a much easier transition. It's less risky such that on a design doc that you want reviewed by product managers, most engineers are going to take the safe route there.

Brian (13:37):

It reminds me of that “no one gets fired for hiring IBM” phrase that they used to have back in the day, the safe route to get it approved by somebody. Yeah.

Mert (13:45):

100%. And it doesn't help that the Solana PR is so bad that everybody's even mistakenly saying, oh, Solana always goes down or Solana's all these different things. You add these up and then as an engineer, if you're at a big firm and you pick Solana, you have to religiously fight or justify your position. And most people just aren't going to do that even if they believe it. That's a big problem. One of the reasons why I think more SVM roll-ups that sell on other chains might be interesting here to give developers more optionality such that if you build on Solana, but Solana has something bad happen, but it's still settling on these other L1's or other data availabilities or whatever it might be. And then three, is of course, there are actual misconceptions about the reliability of the chain.

(14:33):

People think the chain has gone down 12 times or something, or multiple digits. It's actually gone down four times. People conflate performance degradation with outage. Performance degradation is just when you maybe have, you guys obviously notice at Phantom when you maybe aren't landing transactions on chain or maybe there's latency or something like that, that's the functional equivalent of fees getting higher on EVM. That's performance degradation. But an actual outage is actually relatively rare. In fact, the numbers, I think the last time I looked at them were 99.7% uptime, which isn't perfect, but it's also not bad. It's certainly not as bad as something that would go down every day or regularly. I mean there's a misconception there.

Brian (15:15):

Or reorgs in that matter too.

Mert (15:16):

Yeah, exactly. I mean we can kind of talk about that in maybe another part of this, but people don't realize that especially for an indexed company, maybe Coinbase where you're selling funds, those reorgs actually affect your architecture an insane amount because you need to add new systems to communicate, oh actually this block was not correct or something. Whereas on Solana, you don't really need to do that. I mean no block to my knowledge went back after being confirmed.

Brian (15:40):

Yeah. I was going to say I don't think there ever has been a... It's even, yeah, the optimistic confirmed, not even finalized as there's never been a reorg once it's been that. Yeah.

Mert (15:49):

Exactly. Some people think you need ridiculous hardware requirements to run these nodes and that's actually not true. You can run a node, depending on if you want an RPC node or a validator node for really anything from $200 to $800 a month. People think you need actual data centers to run it, which I don't know where people get that from. And then there's also light clients coming out now, right. I can talk all day about the misconceptions, but I think the first two are probably the most justified reasons from actual engineers that I've heard.

Brian (16:20):

Yeah. No, that's a really good take, I think, because one, there's the FUD, which I think is the back half of what you kind of just talked about, which I think that just comes with time and getting people to experiment with Solana and trying it firsthand and understanding there's no better teacher than that, otherwise you're fighting essentially Twitter algorithms. But I think that's a really nuanced take what you had to start, where you're saying the de-risking almost to get this buy-in because you know what it's like to work at these large companies and kind of proliferating Solana there. I also think what Jump is doing with Fired Answer is also just another benefit to that as well. Essentially just reducing the service area potential bugs that occur. Essentially if you have a bug in just one client implementation, adding a second one greatly reduces the chance it'll happen again.

(17:09):

Maybe one way we can take this is instead of fighting the FUD, because that could take all day, is from where you sit right now in Helius, say that you guys have a really interesting position in the space because one, you're super close to what's actually happening as Solana's roadmap evolves. I'd say part of being the pragmatic change is Solana's not afraid to push the boundaries, take risks, add new token programs, NFT compression, just constantly evolving at a fast pace. You guys are close to that and then you're also close to the developers who are coming into this space for the first time, like you said, the hobby weekend developer who's interested and they don't want to learn Rust and so they need some sort of abstraction layer to this coming in some sort of dead platform that's helping them in some way. What are you personally most excited about right now that's happening on Solana?

Mert (18:02):

Well, I mean Compression, I think, maybe is one that's gaining some steam in and an obvious one that I think most people are aware of at this point. But back when I was trying to show it, most people weren't aware. I think our job here is maybe done so now it can kind of take off, but Compression is super exciting because most people don't realize that Compression, actually, let me just explain what it is first. Data storage or state storage on Solana is quite costly. I don't know the exact cost, I guess I would need to look at that chart, but there's some articles on this and you can look at the Helius blog "shill" for seeing the comparisons for the numbers, but basically state storage on Solana is expensive and with Compression, essentially what you can do is instead of storing the data in state, you can store it on ledger. And that might sound a little abstract, but basically instead of needing it for consensus, you securely log it in transaction logs.

(19:00):

Basically it's what an engineer would call a stateless accumulator. I call them L2 because I like doing random marketing stuff, but Toly really doesn't like it. Do not call it an L2. Call it a stateless accumulator, which isn't very beginning friendly, but that is actually what it is. You just store a reference, it's a pointer by reference kind of thing. You store a reference to the data that's on the ledger on the state now instead of storing all the data on the state. And we do that via Merkel Trees, which I'm not going to go into here, but essentially you're able to get a few orders of magnitude and cost reductions. Now that's useful for digital assets and that's the first use case, NFT compression where you can mince thousands, millions, billions of NFTs. People will say like, oh, why do you need to mint a million NFTs, billion NFTs?

(19:45):

And it's like, that's not the point. The point is that we're not limited by technology anymore, whereas before we were, and we can maximize the design space and explore some things, right. You have Dialect doing sticker packs, Cross Mint using their APIs for all sorts of different cases, including loyalty programs, Helium migrating over to Solana for their hotspots using Compression, driphouse doing airdrops, Render potentially using it for their scene graphs, which is a super cool concepts, high map results even using them. And so it clearly has some use, but the cool thing about it is it's not actually limited to NFTs. Actually you can apply to any account, you can extend it to be fungible tokens and also just general account compression, which I think the guys at Gum are doing for some social graph formatives. It actually has quite a bit of potential there.

(20:28):

That's one of the big ones I'm excited about since my name is Compression Mert on Twitter right now. And then the Solana mobile, the Saga phone is awesome. I had a test unit and I've been an Android user my whole life after Blackberry Force and it's the best Android phone I've used and it's super snappy, very good build quality and it actually has changed my consumer behavior somewhat where actually, before I would explicitly shy away from mobile first or mobile crypto apps, I wouldn't use crypto at mobile at all. But now I'm like, okay, this is actually pretty cool. I can use leverage my secure seed vaults. We do need to work on that naming, but I can use that and have that confidence and that seamless integration. You have apps like Otter, Finance, Tip Link, Get Code or I guess just Code Wallet, which enables super fast kind of P2P payments, something like Venmo. And actually, I have used all of these to make payments to my family members and friends, so I'm super excited about that.

(21:27):

The thing I'm most excited about on Solana is this narrative of decentralized physical infrastructure or deepen taking off with not only do you have Helium now and High Mapper, you also have Render Now, Pollen Network, Genesis Go, Teleport and let's see who else we can get over. But I think this kind of intersection of P2P networks and using crypto to actually enable change in the physical world is super interesting and something that wasn't really possible before.

Brian (21:56):

That's super cool. I should say just for the listeners that we are recording this on April 13th, 2023, which is the official Saga launch day, so it's topical to bring that up. We're super excited about that too. I just think it's awesome that they're not afraid to push the boundaries on that. I mean for us at Phantom to not even have the ability to see a user seed phrase and it's just completely abstracted away at the hardware level, I think is awesome and a glimpse of where this is all heading. Let's talk a little bit about DePin too because I'm not as up to speed on that. I don't know if most of our users are. I think Helius migration is happening soon, TM, like this month in April. What are you guys seeing there? Is there any major changes to what you're doing on the infrastructure layer that's going to have to adapt for this? Do you foresee any major changes to end user behavior?

(22:46):

Part of what's interesting about Solana is the fee markets can adjust on a per piece of state level as opposed to if it was on Eth, you could see all of a sudden all your gas fees are increasing just like it would on a crazy NFT mint day. Can you talk a little bit about how you guys are working with this new DePin movement and what you guys are seeing?

Mert (23:05):

Helium particularly is interested in using Compression, or I mean they are using Compression to represent their hotspots and it would cost them just too much money to work with that kind of stuff on any other chain. And so Solana is what makes the most sense. And like you said, the independence of state, which causes individual account based fees as opposed to chain level fees, which doesn't make the UX horrible for one person here either. It's just you might have to pay extra. And so compression is something that they use the most, both High Mapper and Helium and also Render is, I believe, going to use it. They mentioned this in their GitHub migration paper. And so that's kind of the main driver, but also these teams generally have to subscribe to on chain events. And as a larger engineering firm or maybe independent of size, most people prefer getting data pushed to them instead of setting up some polling system to listen for events because there might be issues there.

(24:02):

They actually use our web hooks and then they kind of configure what events they want to listen to and then they kind of have this ease of mind where, okay, Helius will just stream me these events as they happen and I can just kind of plug, play and then forget. If anything happens, Helius will kind of let me know or maybe I'll get a page or something. The web hooks have actually been, it's interesting. When we first came to Solana, there was no web hook products on Solana and I'm not even sure if there was anything like that on Eth. It was just such an obvious thing and we built it and we shipped it and for example, Discord uses that for their integration into Solana. Their first actually Web3 integration, or actually I don't like the term Web3, their first crypto integration was with Solana and that was enabled with the Web hooks and we have some other big names using them now as well.

(24:47):

I don't think those are announced yet, but it's such a simple primitive, but just web hooks and listening to on chain data really helps some of these bigger firms who don't want to spend the time writing all this complex infrastructure code and they can just plug and play into some existing solution.

Brian (25:02):

Yeah. It's future-proofed, essentially. They can build once and they don't have to constantly be readjusting their implementation.

Mert (25:08):

Exactly.

Brian (25:08):

That's awesome. Turning this back to a developer who is maybe listening to this, familiar with EVM, looking at Solana, you guys do a lot, not just on the infrastructure side, but also on developer education, getting developers involved. We can talk about some of the specific initiatives there, but at a high level, what would you say are some of the biggest opportunities for a developer today who's looking at Solana? Where would you guide them to get started?

Mert (25:35):

Well, one thing I'll say is that Solana has maybe two main things that I would mention that might be interesting for folks coming over. One is that it's much earlier than the other ecosystems. And so there's a lot of low hanging fruit and underdeveloped tooling infrastructure, application layer stuff that exists in other chains in some form, but not on Solana. And so as a developer, let's just try to build something and you'll notice what's missing. You'll notice that the deployment workflows aren't great. You'll notice that maybe the monitoring isn't that great either, or maybe it's easy to shoot yourself in the foot with certain types of smart contractors and stuff. You'll notice a ton of problems and that's just your opportunity to make something cool and fix those maybe as open source, maybe as a public good, maybe as a company. And so there's a lot of potential there.

(26:22):

Another thing is that Solana's architecture is, and so this almost kind of contradicts the first point, but not really if you think about it. The architecture of Solana is so different, right. It's functional based where you have actually a lot of modularity within the layer. You have independent state and logic, you have different accounts, localized fee markets, and so it's much more modular than something like ETH where state and logic are coupled. And also obviously the scalability features of Solana are quite different than anything else. And what that means is there's a lot of things that you can actually build that's only possible on Solana.

Brian (26:57):

I love that catchphrase by the way, only possible on Solana TM.

Mert (27:01):

Yeah. I've been a big fan of that one, let's just say. And it's totally true, right. Order books, for example, you saw it with Serum, you're seeing it now with Phoenix. This is before Fire Dancer and before 200ms block times, which will happen. This is the slowest it will be, it's only going to get faster from here. And so there's a bunch of things that are only possible on Solana. And I would strongly encourage people to think from first principles as a developer, look around, see what problems there are. They don't have to be Solana specific, they can just be problems, right. I don't know, maybe it's too slow to send your dad money or maybe it's too hard to offramp crypto, I don't know, something like that. And then usually if you are trying to look for a solution there for that problem, Solana will be able to handle it much more comfortably than others.

(27:47):

And the other important thing is it'll actually scale, right. You want kind of elasticity as a developer such that if your app takes off, you don't want to have to now migrate to another stack or something. With Solana, it's honestly just plug into a cloud provider, just kind of scales with you. But also a third thing I'll actually mention, which this really should have been number one, but I would encourage you very, very strongly to produce content, especially developer related content. Build something, learn from it and then write about it, make a podcast, produce a video, produce a tutorial, just write content. And not only will that obviously help you connect with other people who are in the ecosystem and like-minded and building other cool stuff, but also when you write stuff and produce content, you have to know what you're talking about, otherwise you won't be able to write it, right. It'll make you connect the dots and it'll point out flaws in your thinking.

Brian (28:44):

Yeah. It's the fastest way to get the right answer on the internet is to publish something that's wrong.

Mert (28:49):

Exactly. And so I guess maybe to go along with that is just have a high tolerance for looking, I don't want to say stupid, but just have a high tolerance for being wrong. You're going to be wrong a lot, but that's not a bad thing unless you're building the infrastructure for handling, I don't know, some critical payments or something. But you're probably not going to be doing that.

Brian (29:10):

Yeah. It's like the pursuit of truth. If you're open to that and you're excited to get told what's right, I couldn't agree more that's 100% the best way to build.

Mert (29:19):

Yeah. Sometimes I'll post something that I think is correct, but it's not apparently actually correct because Toly will comment and he'll gently say something that's slightly unrelated, but it's like, oh, okay, I'm wrong, I guess. I will retract this. And so honestly, it's just a fun way to learn and you do enough cycles of that and you are going to be doing that to other people and that's how we grow.

Brian (29:46):

Yeah, I totally agree. I think this ties in with what you were saying earlier of Solana being the pragmatic chain. I think part of the benefit, there's a knock, we talked about it, about, hey, Solana's new, it's different and you're essentially fighting network effects at that point. But part of the benefit is you get to build your own genuine kernel of a developer ecosystem and start from first principles and start from new and not be afraid to change things new. And I think that's been pretty eye-opening, even just to me personally. As Phantom enters EVM, we're looking at everything that EVM has inherited over the years. Most obvious one being even just how injected wallets play with each other on EVM is so different than Solana because Solana took a very first principles approach and said, we're going to do this in a way that you have a wallet, you can use it anywhere, it's going to scale forever kind of thing. And it's been pretty eye-opening to see the differences there.

(30:36):

That would be my only other thing I'd add to you is if you are a dev and you want to make it high impact on, it's probably the best place for it because you can post publicly about why you're doing what you're doing and you'll get people who are interested in listening and will back you on the basis and the merits of your ideas is what I'd say.

Mert (30:52):

Yeah, absolutely. Me, Chase and other parts of the developer system will help you the best we can. Basically the Helius tagline is actually “Where Solana teams succeed” because our entire goal is to help you succeed. That's essentially why I wake up and that's what I spend my entire day doing. And the Phantom founders, for example, are great example of this, right. They came from EVM and they saw what was possible on Solana and they built the number one wallet in crypto and it had such good UX and such good design and stuff, and you guys absolutely dominated. And then now you're actually transcending the change, right. It's actually becoming a product, it's not just a chain’s product, it's just a product that you can use to onboard people onto crypto. I really like that approach from starting from first principles like you guys. You saw Meta Mask and you're like, okay, well we're going to do it differently. And you did it much better in my view. And so I think that's just an example of what’s possible.

Brian (31:50):

Thanks. Yeah, I mean we love hearing that, but obviously love everything that Solana's doing and Solana's always going to be home. There's a lot to do on Solana. I'm excited to roll up the sleeves this year and get started. I guess, Mert, and as we start to wrap this up, one question we always ask all our guests, I'd love to hear this from you. You mentioned a lot of people on this podcast, a lot of teams, but I'd love to know, is there a particular builder that you admire in the Solana ecosystem?

Mert (32:17):

Oh man. I mean, I do admire my co-founders, to be honest. I don't think they got that much credit because I'm kind of the loud one, but Nick and Liam are super, they're actually the driving force behind Helius and they do all of the engineering, and I do essentially nothing other than just larp on Twitter. Them for sure, but also, I'll give you my general approach on this, actually, maybe this is useful for someone, but my general approach to Twitter is whenever I see a founder on somebody's bio or something like that, or maybe a co-founder or something, I'll immediately follow them because those people are super inspiring to me. I pretty much follow all the founders on Solana at this point, I think. For example, the founder of Squat, Stephan Wright. I saw him, I was like, I'm going to follow this guy.

(33:01):

Turns out amazing dude, we're friends now. That's my general approach. I just respect all the founders in the ecosystem because they're taking big risks and they're trying to build cool stuff, and they're all trying to help the ecosystem. And so I have just huge respect for everyone there. Someones, I would probably point out specifically, would be obviously Armani and Tristan, huge respect for them. The founders of Gito, right, Sec, Fault and Buffaloo, I'll just say their pseudonym names. Co-founders of Squads, right, Margin, Drift, Zeta, for example. All the DeFi protocols. I'm probably just going to end up listing literally every single one. I would say if there's one particular one, it would be, I guess honestly just Toly, right. That's probably a cliche answer, but Toly just always keeps his composure under people just relentlessly slinging mud at his life's work essentially, and in a super unfair way. And he still gets up. And I mean, not only does he engage with the community, but he still builds cool stuff and there's so many different things. I have no idea how he does it, and I have a ton of respect for that.

Brian (34:08):

Well, I think that's the perfect answer. Having listed all the major founders in Solana, and then you go back to the guy who started it all, he sets the tone for the space and I think he makes it that drama free, practical, pragmatic, how do we build practical that's useful today. That's been my answer secretly too, that no one's asked me, but... Well, Mert, this has been awesome. Thanks so much for coming on. We'll have to do this again later once we've shipped all these crazy upgrades to Solana and check in again. But where can folks go to learn more about Helius?

Mert (34:42):

Yeah. Just helius.xyz. You can just go there or you can just @ me on Twitter. That's honestly how most people get in contact with me. Just tag me on Twitter on something and I'll respond.

Brian (34:50):

Awesome. Love it. Mert, the founder and CEO of Helius. Thanks so much for coming on.

Mert (34:54):

Thank you for having me.

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