NEAR Foundation has appointed Mert Mumtaz, chief executive of Solana infrastructure company Helius, to its governing Council, bringing an executive with deep experience in blockchain data and transaction systems into the group directing NEAR’s product, ecosystem and governance priorities.
The appointment places Mumtaz alongside NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin, Anchorage Digital co-founder Diogo MĂłnica, former NEAR Foundation chief operating officer Chris Donovan, and NEAR One founder Bowen Wang. The Council oversees high-level decisions at the foundation, which supports development of the NEAR ecosystem.
NEAR Foundation said Mumtaz will contribute to product strategy, ecosystem growth and governance work connected to its private onchain market plans. He will also serve as a judge for the NEAR Hackathon, scheduled to run from Nov. 1 through Nov. 14.
The move links NEAR’s governance structure with an operator whose company has built infrastructure for Solana applications and institutions, including Phantom, Jupiter, Coinbase and Bitwise. Helius offers remote procedure call, or RPC, nodes that let applications communicate with Solana; its products also cover data streaming, transaction delivery and validator services.
Mumtaz’s arrival comes as NEAR seeks to expand use of NEAR Intents, a system designed to simplify activity across blockchains by allowing users to state an intended outcome rather than manually execute every transaction step across separate networks. NEAR Foundation said Mumtaz was an early user of the product.
Intents growth meets a recent security test
NEAR Foundation said NEAR Intents has processed more than $33 billion in cumulative volume. It also reported that confidential total value locked, a measure of assets deposited into privacy-oriented onchain infrastructure, exceeds $160 million.
Those figures arrive shortly after a security incident put the project’s operational resilience under scrutiny. Earlier this month, NEAR Intents disclosed a $3.8 million exploit involving a flaw in its deposit and withdrawal infrastructure.
The project said it patched the vulnerability, but deposits and withdrawals across 11 networks were disrupted for an extended period. The incident exposed the practical difficulty of operating systems that coordinate asset movements across several chains: a fault in the infrastructure handling transfers can affect users even when the underlying blockchains remain operational.
For NEAR, Mumtaz’s technical background is relevant beyond the headline value of a Council appointment. Cross-chain products depend on reliable data feeds, transaction routing and node infrastructure to determine whether funds have moved and whether the next action in a transaction sequence should occur. Delays or incorrect information at those layers can create failed transfers, temporary liquidity constraints or more serious security exposures.
Helius has focused on those operational layers within Solana’s ecosystem. Its experience does not automatically transfer to NEAR’s architecture or solve the issues revealed in the recent exploit, but it gives the Council direct familiarity with the infrastructure that high-volume applications rely on as they scale.
A Council role rather than an operational mandate
The Council is NEAR Foundation’s governing body, rather than a development team responsible for writing and deploying code. Mumtaz’s role therefore places him in discussions around strategic direction and governance instead of assigning him direct control over the Intents infrastructure.
That distinction matters as NEAR pursues private onchain markets. Privacy-focused financial applications require developers to balance confidentiality with systems that can reliably settle trades, manage collateral and respond to technical failures. Governance decisions can shape how quickly products are introduced, which external partners are used and how risk management is handled after incidents.
NEAR has increasingly presented Intents as a way to reduce the friction of moving between networks. In a typical cross-chain transaction, a user may need to choose a bridge, obtain gas tokens on another chain, approve token contracts and wait for several transactions to complete. Intent-based systems aim to replace much of that sequence with a request such as swapping one asset for another, while specialized participants compete to fulfill the request.
That model can make multi-network activity easier for users, but it also concentrates attention on the systems coordinating deposits, withdrawals and fulfillment. The $3.8 million exploit illustrates why growth metrics alone do not settle the question of whether a cross-chain system is ready for larger pools of assets.
Solana infrastructure experience enters NEAR governance
Helius was founded to make Solana data easier for developers and applications to access. Its services include APIs, streaming tools and transaction-processing products, areas that become more consequential when applications need fast, dependable information from a busy network.
Mumtaz has been a prominent public advocate for Solana’s technical ecosystem, often focusing on network performance and developer infrastructure. His appointment broadens NEAR Council’s range of operating experience beyond the foundation’s own technology and strategy.
The Council’s existing members reflect a mix of NEAR-native leadership, institutional custody experience and product development. Polosukhin co-founded NEAR, while Mónica’s Anchorage Digital background brings experience from regulated digital-asset custody. Donovan previously served as NEAR Foundation’s chief operating officer, and Wang founded NEAR One, the organization developing core NEAR technology.
Adding a leader from a major Solana infrastructure provider could help NEAR evaluate product decisions through the lens of application reliability and developer requirements, particularly as it seeks to serve users moving assets and activity between chains.
Hackathon role puts focus on builders
Mumtaz is also due to judge the NEAR Hackathon from Nov. 1 to Nov. 14, giving him an early role in engaging with developers building on the network.
Hackathons can provide a useful view of where a platform’s tools remain difficult to use. For a project promoting cross-chain intents and private market infrastructure, developers will need dependable documentation, testing environments and clear ways to integrate wallets, liquidity sources and transaction-routing systems.
The Council appointment does not alter the immediate facts of the recent Intents exploit or restore the period of disruption experienced across the affected networks. It does, though, adds an infrastructure-focused voice as NEAR works to grow a product line whose appeal rests on making complex multi-chain activity feel simpler without obscuring the technical and security demands underneath it.
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