Mert Mumtaz left Coinbase to found Solana developer tools firm Helius in June 2022. But just a few months later FTX collapsed, taking the price of SOL down 60% with it.
Solana had soared to its all-time high of $260 a year earlier, in November 2021, thanks in part to its high-profile champion, billionaire FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried.
Mert the Magnificent in Singapore. (X)
But when it became apparent SBF was headed to jail over the $8 billion fraud, many thought Solana might never recover. But if you think Mumtaz was worried about his fledgling company’s future, you’d be wrong.
“It kept going down,” Mumtaz, 29, tells Magazine during an interview in Singapore. “It hit $8 at one point and I still had zero doubts.”
For the developer, who had also worked for major Canadian banks before devoting himself to Solana, clearing out the bad actors actually seemed like a good thing. And while the blockchain had suffered a lot of bad publicity that year over chain halts, he also knew the spam problem had largely been addressed.
“People did not see it that way, because they thought that the chain was successful because of FTX,” he recalls.
“But since we were already building on it, our numbers were going up. So we were getting more developers week after week, month after month,” he says. “And I was like, ‘This is not true.’ And in fact, since we’re super technical, we saw that there were a bunch of improvements that were made to the network that actually made it much better than before.”
SBF’s departure had left an opening for a new high-profile Solana champion, and Mumtaz’s unshakeable conviction in the project made him the perfect candidate.
“It occurred to me that people have so many fundamental misunderstandings of how Solana works that somebody needs to go out on Twitter, which is where the discussion happens, and be like, ‘No, like, you’re wrong, and here are…
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