NEAR Foundation appoints Mert Mumtaz to its Council

The NEAR Foundation has appointed Mert Mumtaz, CEO of Helius, to the Foundation Council. NEAR announced it on X on 15 October. The Council oversees the Foundation and its most significant decisions.

Mumtaz will help guide product strategy, ecosystem growth and governance. He continues to lead the infrastructure work at Helius. The blog says teams including Phantom, Jupiter, Coinbase and Bitwise build on Solana with it: RPC nodes, data streaming, transaction delivery and validators.

He joins Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of NEAR Protocol, and Diogo Mónica, co-founder of Anchorage Digital. The release also names Chris Donovan, former COO of the NEAR Foundation, and Bowen Wang, founder of NEAR One.

The press release names Mumtaz as a judge for the NEAR Hackathon, a two-week build sprint covering NEAR Intents and NEAR AI Cloud. Development runs from 1 to 14 November. The Foundation plans to announce results by 18 November.

In the release, Mumtaz says crypto needs “connected, unstoppable liquidity” at planetary scale, “a market of markets.” Solana, Zcash and Bitcoin do not win on their own, he said. He called NEAR the way there.

The release says NEAR Intents has processed more than $33 billion in all-time volume, with confidential TVL over $160 million. The blog entry is dated 14 October. The X post and the press release are dated 15 October.

Sources

• NEAR Protocol — Post, 15 October 2026, 3:55 p.m. Berlin
• Mert Mumtaz — Post, 15 October 2026, 4:03 p.m. Berlin
• NEAR Foundation — Blog, dated 14 October 2026
• NEAR Foundation — Press release, 15 October 2026, 4:00 p.m. Berlin. Judging panel and hackathon dates, 1–14 November, results by 18 November. Other judges named: Eddy Lazzarin (a16z crypto), Avichal Garg (Electric Capital), Kain Warwick (Synthetix and Infinex), Haseeb Qureshi (Dragonfly), Stepan Gershuni (cyber•Fund). Claude Code and Codex as AI judges.