‘Perhaps I like Solana more than anyone else.’

Mert Mumtaz acquired Solana developer tools company Helios in June 2022. But after a few months FTX crashed, SOL price dropped by 60%.

Solana rose to $260 a year ago. In November 2021, thanks in part to her high-profile champion, billionaire FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried.

But when it was revealed that SBF was headed to prison for an $8 billion fraud, many thought Solana would never recover. But if you thought Mumtaz was concerned about the future of the fledgling company, you'd be wrong.

“It kept going down,” Mumtaz, 29, told the magazine in an interview in Singapore. “It came to $8 at one time and I still had no doubts.”

Cleaning up bad actors seems like a good thing for Solana, a developer who worked at major Canadian banks before turning himself in. And while blockchain received a lot of bad publicity that year due to chain shutdowns, he also knows that the spam problem has largely been solved.

“People didn't see it that way, because they thought the chain was successful because of FTX,” he recalls.

“But as we were building it, our numbers were increasing. So week by week, month by month we were getting more developers,” he said. “And I was like, ‘That's not true.' And in fact, since we are extremely technical, we have seen that the improvements in the network are better than before.

The rise of SBF left an opening for a new high-profile Solana champion, and Mumtaz's unwavering faith in the project made him the perfect candidate.

“People have so many fundamental misunderstandings about how Solana works that someone needs to get on Twitter, where the discussion is going, and say, ‘No, you're wrong, and here are the facts to back it up.'

“That's when I started being an answerer. And every time people post something, they're like, ‘Well, that's not right. This is the reality. And basically I mean that for… I still haven't stopped.”

Driving the road to success

Mumtaz looks a little gray today after four days of surviving “food poisoning, worst ever”. At X, he's been complaining about the nicotine withdrawal since his favorite zines aren't legal in Singapore, and after giving up coffee.

But he smiles and says of his posts, “I'm mostly just walking around.”

Combined with his trolling skills, sharp mind and deep technical knowledge, Mumtaz has emerged as one of the big personalities at Crypto X. Last month he was later crypto's top key opinion, influential Ansem, Base builder Jesse Pollak and Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin.

At least some of Solana's remarkable turnaround since 2022 can be attributed to the continued bull posting.

Mumtaz fights anyone he believes is spreading rumors about Solana – even challenging Edward Snowden in a recent oral argument that Solana is a centrist.

He was quick to become popular as he only discovered Solana while working at Coinbase in 2021. When he had only a few followers, Solana's initial efforts to get the word out caught the attention of contributor Armani Ferrante, the Solana Foundation, and later blockchain founder Anatoly “Tolly” Yakovenko.

“Everybody from Solana started following me at that point, because, as a base, it's a bad look to just go out and say, ‘Our chain is better than yours and stuff, but I could do that.' And they appreciated that.

Mert Mumtaz: Above Solana maxi

The best thing about Mumtaz is that while he spends a lot of time talking about Solana, he's not a completely one-eyed maxi and has invested in Cosmos Chains, Monad and Ethereum L2s.

“I also hate Solana over and over again, which seems to be what people miss, like I FUD Solana more than anyone I know,” he said.

“Basically, I'm an engineer, and I care about systems being better. “I think Solana is the best system, but it's certainly not the only system, and it's not the perfect system,” he says.

He sued the Solana Foundation for publishing misleading statistics about Solana's nodes and Ethereum's Nakamoto Coefficient results. Solana doesn't like the term “network extension,” which is widely derided for L2s. This week, Solana asked podcaster Grill Tolly whether “every chain has a moat in a world where it's fast, scalable, and cheap.”

he is. Targeted accounts that advertise suspicious sStatistics suggest that Solana has 100 million monthly active addresses (critics argue that the statistics are inflated and mostly made up of bots).

When altcoin Daily Solana posted a chart showing that it had 5 million daily active users, Posting Here said, “No, no. Everyone is fooled by this useless statistic.

He also took aim at Solana's infamous block browser and recently posted about Solana's ABI problem with “unreadable browsers, inconsistent stats, constant ecosystem integrations (wallet history, contract calls) etc.”

“Can someone help me understand why no one seems to be talking?”

He told the magazine, “This is one of the things Ethereum does better than Solana.

Mumtaz Solana explains that it is optimized for efficiency and coded in a way that looks like “random hashes and strings” onchain and requires “decoding from smart contracts”.

But he said there is no central place where people can publish their plans. “And because a good chunk of the code isn't open source, it's really hard to understand what's going on,” he said.

E.V.M [Ethereum Virtual Machine] It's very simple, like Etherscan basically all these people don't publish it right there and we don't have the same process on Solana. But it is a problem that can be solved. And that's kind of what I was trying to say earlier, which Solana does, but it takes a lot of equipment to make it really great, which is why Helios is there.

Helios is becoming important to Solana Consensys for Ethereum, and fulfills the same role.

Who is Mert Mumtaz anyway?

Born in Istanbul, Turkey, his father, who moved to Niagara Falls when Mumtaz was a child, began to worry about the influence of conservative leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

He said of Stamford College in Niagara Falls: “I went to the same high school that James Cameron went to. “Looks like the worst high school in Canada.” Mumtaz revealed that he attended the same university as Elon Musk and entered the same highly selective math program as longtime expert Peter Attia.

Also read: 5 risks to be aware of when entering Solana memecoins

The well-built Mumtaz spent a lot of time playing rugby, football, wrestling and kickboxing and didn't take long to learn.

Instead of tweeting, “I was very involved in martial arts to vent my anger; Let's say,” he explained. He originally planned to attend Queen's University on a sports scholarship, but later realized:

“If I want to be an entrepreneur and build things and, you know, use my brain. Maybe I shouldn't get hit over the head so much.”

Last week on X, he elaborated on this story, revealing his change of heart in the game Skyrim, where he got his ass kicked by “little donkeys in cloaked books”.

“I got really angry and pissed off and I had a really funny realization: Knowledge is literally more valuable than anything else on earth.”

Instead of MMA and rugby, he focused on maths and science and eventually studied for an engineering degree. He was accepted into Apple's math application program, which only accepts 30 people a year.

“That's when I met my co-founders from Helios, Liam (Vovk) and Nick (Penny).

The three became fast friends and Vovk and Mumtaz spent five years together. Mumtaz's plans to pursue a PhD in physics put aside a year-long internship at BlackBerry. Watching the tech company roll out new models and updates made him eager to make an impact in the real world rather than academic or abstract math.

“I like the way people ship things that people use, it's more fun than doing a PhD in science. And when I came back, I dropped out.

In his spare time he tries to do things, like the original chatgpt system that turned into a keyboard autocomplete. At that time, Ethereum was gaining momentum, and although it offered offers from projects such as “building the education system, but on blockchains”, none of the use cases seemed encouraging.

Instead, he worked for three of Canada's five largest banks in areas of cyber security, business infrastructure, digital payments and ATM withdrawal systems.

In early 2021, when the coin finally dropped for crypto, Michelle Romanow, a tech entrepreneur, was building payment systems for Clearbanc.

“There was a day when I built a system that sent money from Canada to Australia, and it was very inefficient because it had to go through all these jurisdictions,” he said. “I was like: ‘Why don't we just use something like Ethereum to make this a lot easier and save everyone money and headaches?' And basically people didn't believe in crypto.

“So I'm frustrated with that mentality.”

Mert joined Coinbase and found Solana

He left the banking world and joined Coinbase as an engineer on the platform team in April 2021 “one week before listing”.

“When I joined, it was still a startup movement, and it was relatively early, and most of the bull run hadn't really happened yet,” he recalls. “It wasn't until Coinbase went public that everything started going crazy.”

While at the exchange, Solana began delving into crypto projects, looking at Polkadot and Avalanche before catching his eye. “It's built as a communications system, like Tolly Dara, with cell towers and things like that,” he said.

From his own communications engineering background, he says, “I was like, ‘That actually makes a lot of sense. And no one can handle it that way. So I started building things on Solana on my own time,” he says.

“At one point I built most of the NFT bots used by the ecosystem.”

But trying to integrate Solana with Coinbase's systems underscores just how far Ethereum is moving forward with developer tools and Etherscan. On the other hand, competitors have outpaced Ethereum by expanding.

“My thinking was, ‘OK, we can wait five or six years for the Ethereum roadmap to sort itself out, or we can build on Solana today.'

“And I had that bet, and no one believed it at the time, but I was like, yeah, so I'm going to start a company to help solve the developer problems on Solana, because I myself face it every day. , building materials. So I left Coinbase and started Helios.”

He robbed Vovk and Penny, who worked at Tik Tok and AWS, respectively. They didn't know the first thing about Solana at the time, but they were quick learners. Although they came as engineers, they became equal partners in the business.

He hit the road to leverage VC investment to further grow Helios.

“Basically they all said no. He was either ‘Solana is too small, it's not where the developers are.' or ‘I don't see this as big business.'

But once again, his tendency to get attention on Twitter proved useful. One of the first viral articles complained about mentally incompetent 80-year-olds running the country. This caught the eye of the VC who started following him. He arrived while raising money, and the VC introduced him to Reciprocal, an early-stage crypto VC firm based in New York.

“And Reciprocal already had a thesis that Solana wanted something like this… and so I was like, ‘Yeah, we're going to invest,' and then I was able to put together a round and raise the seed for Helios.

Friendly and relaxed in real life

In the hour or so of our interview, Mumtaz comes across as a low-key but friendly person. On X, he seems more polite, but says that's mainly because people make so many outrageous claims online.

“It really depends on the stimuli that trigger my reaction. In real life, people don't say funny things like they do on Twitter. But if I hear that in real life, I'll do the same thing.”

Although he gets into fights on a daily basis, he never manages to have any legal dramas or get into any real trouble.

“Maybe one issue, right back in the day, when I called Polygon was paying people to use the chain with all these aids and things,” he says. “Then everyone in that ecosystem, including the founders and stuff, got pissed off.”

He said he had reconciled with Polygon and “we're friends now,” but Helius said the company was never dragged into the drama.

“It's like very powerful conflicts, you know, from other ecosystems, let's say, but never from the company. When my investors first invested, they didn't expect me to be tweeting the way I do, and maybe they were a little nervous.

But I actually, surprisingly, never got into trouble.

Andrew Fenton

Based in Melbourne, Andrew Fenton is a journalist and editor covering cryptocurrency and blockchain. He has worked as a film journalist for News Corp Australia, SA Wind and national entertainment writer for Melbourne Weekly.

Follow the author @andrewfenton