‘I probably FUD Solana the most out of anybody’

Mert Mumtaz left Coinbase to discovered Solana developer instruments agency Helius in June 2022. However only a few months later FTX collapsed, taking the worth of SOL down 60% with it.

Solana had soared to its all-time excessive of $260 a 12 months earlier, in November 2021, thanks partly to its high-profile champion, billionaire FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried.

However when it turned obvious SBF was headed to jail over the $8 billion fraud, many thought Solana would possibly by no means recuperate. However should you suppose Mumtaz was nervous about his fledgling firm’s future, you’d be fallacious.

“It stored happening,” Mumtaz, 29, tells Journal throughout an interview in Singapore. “It hit $8 at one level and I nonetheless had zero doubts.”

For the developer, who had additionally labored for main Canadian banks earlier than devoting himself to Solana, clearing out the dangerous actors truly appeared like a great factor. And whereas the blockchain had suffered a number of dangerous publicity that 12 months over chain halts, he additionally knew the spam downside had largely been addressed. 

“Folks didn’t see it that approach, as a result of they thought that the chain was profitable due to FTX,” he remembers.

“However since we have been already constructing on it, our numbers have been going up. So we have been getting extra builders week after week, month after month,” he says. “And I used to be like, ‘This isn’t true.’ And actually, since we’re tremendous technical, we noticed that there have been a bunch of enhancements that have been made to the community that really made it a lot better than earlier than.”

SBF’s departure had left a gap for a brand new high-profile Solana champion, and Mumtaz’s unshakeable conviction within the mission made him the right candidate.  

“It occurred to me that folks have so many basic misunderstandings of how Solana works that someone must exit on Twitter, which is the place the dialogue occurs, and be like, ‘No, like, you’re fallacious, and listed below are the information to again this up.’”

“That’s after I began to kind of develop into a reply man. And each time folks would submit one thing, I’d simply say, ‘Properly, that’s incorrect. Listed here are the information.’ And mainly simply stored doing that for… I imply, I nonetheless haven’t stopped.”

Trolling his option to success

Mumtaz appears to be like a little bit grey immediately, having simply survived 4 days of “meals poisoning, the worst ever.” On X he’s been complaining about nicotine withdrawal, as his beloved Zyns aren’t authorized in Singapore, and caffeine withdrawal after he gave up espresso.

He grins although and says concerning the posts: “I’m simply trolling largely.”

His trolling potential, mixed with a pointy mind and deep technical data, has seen Mumtaz emerge as one of many largest personalities on Crypto X.  Over the previous month he was crypto’s high key opinion later, forward of influencer Ansem, Base builder Jesse Pollak and Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin.

A minimum of a few of Solana’s spectacular turnaround since 2022 might be attributed to his incessant bull posting.

Mumtaz will struggle anybody he believes is spreading bullshit about Solana — even difficult Edward Snowden to a verbal duel over his latest declare that Solana is centralized.

It’s been a fast rise to prominence given he solely found Solana in 2021 whereas working at Coinbase. His early efforts speaking up Solana when he had only a handful of followers caught the eye of contributor Armani Ferrante, the Solana Basis and later the blockchain’s founder Anatoly “Toly” Yakovenko.

“All people from Solana began following me round that point, as a result of, as a basis, it’s a foul look to simply exit and say a bunch of stuff like: ‘Our chain is healthier than yours’ and stuff, however I may do this. And they also appreciated that.”

Mert Mumtaz: Greater than only a Solana maxi

One of the best factor about Mumtaz is that whereas he positively spends a number of time speaking up Solana, he’s not completely a one-eyed maxi and has invested in Cosmos chains, Monad and even Ethereum L2s.

“I additionally shit on Solana fairly ceaselessly, which individuals sort of appear to overlook, like I in all probability FUD Solana essentially the most out of anyone I’m conscious of,” he says.

“Essentially, I’m an engineer, and I care concerning the techniques being higher. I do suppose Solana is the very best system, nevertheless it’s actually not the one system, and it’s additionally not an ideal system,” he says. 

He’s challenged the Solana Basis for issuing deceptive stats about Solana’s nodes and Ethereum’s Nakamoto coefficient rating. He doesn’t just like the broadly derided “community extensions” time period for Solana L2s. This week he advised a podcaster grill Toly about whether or not Solana has a “moat in a world the place each chain is quick, scalable and low-cost.”

He’s focused accounts that promote doubtful statistics, just like the chart suggesting that Solana has 100 million month-to-month lively addresses (critics argue the stats are inflated and comprise largely bots).

When Altcoin Day by day posted a chart exhibiting Solana has 5 million day by day lively customers, he reposted it, saying, “No, it doesn’t. everybody fuck off with this ineffective stat.”

He’s additionally taken goal at Solana’s famously horrible block explorer and lately posted about Solana’s ABI downside with “unreadable explorers, inconsistent stats, continually damaged ecosystem integrations (pockets histories, contract calls), and many others.”

“Can somebody assist me perceive why noone appears to present a fuck.”

He tells Journal, “This is likely one of the issues that Ethereum does a lot better than Solana.”

Mumtaz explains that Solana is optimized for effectivity, and coded in a approach that appears like a “bunch of random hashes and strings” onchain and requires “a schema from the sensible contract to decode it.”

However he says there’s no central place for folks to publish their schemas. “And since a great chunk of the code shouldn’t be open supply, it’s very laborious to know what’s happening,” he says. 

“Whereas EVM [Ethereum Virtual Machine] it’s a lot less complicated, like Etherscan has mainly all these folks truly publish it there, and we simply don’t have that very same course of on Solana. However it’s a solvable downside. And so that is sort of what I used to be attempting to say earlier, which is that Solana works, nevertheless it wants a number of tooling to make it really nice, which is why Helius exists.”

Helius is changing into as necessary to Solana as Consensys is to Ethereum, and it fulfills an analogous function.

So who’s Mert Mumtaz?

Born in Istanbul Turkey, the household moved to Niagara Falls when Mumtaz was a child after his dad began to develop into alarmed on the affect of conservative strongman chief Recep Tayyip Erdogan.  

“I truly went to the identical highschool that James Cameron went to,” he says of Stamford Collegiate in Niagara Falls. “It’s like, the worst highschool in Canada by rating.” Mumtaz additionally notes he went to the identical college as Elon Musk, and the identical extremely selective math program as longevity skilled Peter Attia.

Additionally learn: 5 risks to beware when apeing into Solana memecoins

Properly-built, Mumtaz devoted a number of time to rugby, soccer, wrestling and kickboxing and never a lot time to review.

“I used to be very into fight sports activities, which is the place I used to get my anger out, let’s say, as a substitute of Twitter,” he explains. He initially deliberate to attend Queens College on a sports activities scholarship however later realized:

“If I wish to be an entrepreneur and construct issues and, you realize, use my mind. I ought to in all probability not be getting hit within the head an excessive amount of.”

He went into extra element on this story on X final week, attributing his change of coronary heart to getting his ass kicked by “tiny ass dudes in robes with books” within the sport Skyrim.

“I bought rekt so laborious and rage give up after which had a hilarious realization: data is rather more helpful than actually anything on earth.”

As a substitute of MMA and rugby, he refocused his consideration on math and science and ended up finding out for an engineering diploma. He was accepted into the elite Apple Math utilized arithmetic program, which solely accepts 30 folks a 12 months.

“That’s truly the place I met my co-founders for Helius, Liam (Vovk) and Nick (Pennie).”

The three turned quick associates, and Vovk and Mumtaz spent 5 years as roommates. Mumtaz’s plan to pursue a PhD in Physics bought sidetracked by a year-long internship at Blackberry. Watching the tech firm roll out new fashions and updates made him desperate to have an effect in the actual world as a substitute of academia or summary math. 

“I simply appreciated the strategy of transport issues that folks use, it’s rather more thrilling than doing a PhD in science. And so after I got here again, I mainly simply smooth give up college.”

In his spare time he’d attempt to construct stuff, like his try to construct an early ChatGPT system that became a keyboard autocomplete. Ethereum was selecting up velocity round that point, and though he fielded presents from tasks doing issues like “constructing the training system, however on blockchains,” not one of the use instances appeared that inspiring. 

As a substitute, he ended up working for 3 of the 5 largest banks in Canada in cybersecurity, buying and selling infrastructure, digital funds and ATM withdrawal techniques.

He was constructing cost techniques for tech entrepreneur Michele Romanow’s Clearbanc when the penny lastly dropped about crypto in early 2021.

“There was a day the place I needed to construct a system that sends cash to Australia from Canada, and it was actually inefficient as a result of it needed to soar by way of all these jurisdictions,” he says. “I used to be like, ‘Why don’t we simply use one thing like Ethereum to make this a lot simpler and simply save all people cash and complications?’ And mainly, folks simply didn’t imagine in crypto.”

“So I bought upset with that mind-set.”

Mert joins Coinbase and discovers Solana

He ditched the world of banking and joined Coinbase as an engineer on the platform staff about “per week earlier than it listed” in April 2021.

“Once I joined, it was nonetheless startup vibes, and comparatively early, and many of the bull run hadn’t actually occurred but,” he remembers. “It wasn’t till Coinbase went public the place every little thing began going insane.”

Throughout his time on the change, he began researching crypto tasks in additional depth, taking a look at Polkadot and Avalanche earlier than Solana caught his eye. He says it appealed as a result of “it was constructed as a communication system like Toly’s background is cell towers and stuff like that.”

Given his personal communications engineering background, “I used to be like this truly makes a number of sense. And no person else is tackling it this manner. So I simply began constructing stuff on Solana in my very own time,” he says.

“At one level I’d constructed many of the NFT bots that the ecosystem used.”

However attempting to combine Solana into Coinbase’s techniques underlined simply how far forward Ethereum was in developer instruments and with Etherscan. Alternatively, rivals had overtaken Ethereum in scaling potential.  

“The thought I had was ‘OK we will both wait like 5, six years for the Ethereum roadmap to settle itself out till issues begin scaling, or we will construct on Solana immediately’.”

“And so I had that wager, and clearly no person else believed at the moment, however I used to be like, yeah, so I’m simply going to start out an organization that helps resolve the developer issues on Solana, as a result of I face them day by day myself, constructing stuff. And so I give up Coinbase and began Helius.”

He roped in Vovk and Pennie, who have been working at TikTok and AWS, respectively. They didn’t know the very first thing about Solana on the time, however they have been fast college students. Though they have been introduced on as engineers, they turned equal companions within the enterprise. 

To develop Helius additional, he hit the street to drum up VC funding.

“Mainly all of them mentioned no. It was both ‘Solana is simply too small, that’s not the place the builders are.’ Or ‘I don’t see this as being an enormous enterprise.’”

However once more, his propensity for getting consideration on Twitter got here in helpful. Considered one of his early viral posts was a grievance about mentally incompetent 80-year-olds operating the nation. This caught the attention of a VC who began following him. He reached out whereas he was elevating cash, and the VC launched him to New York-based early-stage crypto VC agency Reciprocal.

“And Reciprocal already had the thesis that Solana would wish one thing like this… And they also’re like, ‘yeah, we’ll make investments’ after which I used to be in a position to put a spherical collectively and lift a seed spherical for a Helius.”

Pleasant and relaxed in actual life

Within the hour or so of our interview, Mumtaz comes throughout as a low-key however pleasant man. On X, he appears much more feisty, however he says that’s primarily as a result of folks make a bunch of outrageous claims on-line.

“It actually is determined by the stimuli that triggers my response. It simply so occurs that in actual life, folks don’t say blatantly ridiculous stuff as a lot as they do on Twitter. But when I hear that in actual life, I’ll additionally sort of act the identical.”

Regardless of stepping into day by day conflicts he’s but to have any authorized dramas, or get into any actual bother.

“Perhaps one case is like, again within the day, after I referred to as out that Polygon was paying folks to make use of the chain with all these grants and stuff,” he says. “Then all people from that ecosystem bought mad together with all of the founders and stuff.”

He says he’s since made peace with Polygon and “we’re now associates” however provides Helius the corporate has by no means bought dragged into the drama.

“It’s similar to tremendous violent disagreements from, you realize, different ecosystems, let’s say, however by no means from the corporate. I believe my buyers, after they first invested, they weren’t anticipating me to be like, tweeting the best way I do, and they also have been in all probability a bit nervous.”

“However I’ve truly, surprisingly, by no means bought in bother.”

Andrew Fenton

Primarily based in Melbourne, Andrew Fenton is a journalist and editor overlaying cryptocurrency and blockchain. He has labored as a nationwide leisure author for Information Corp Australia, on SA Weekend as a movie journalist, and at The Melbourne Weekly.

Comply with the writer @andrewfenton