Bitcoin proved that cryptographic money works. Ethereum proved that money could be programmable. Solana then proved that it could scale. However, one property never arrived. Blockchains remain permanently, exhaustively public.
Mert Mumtaz, co-founder and CEO of Helius, calls that gap the last real barrier to adoption. He joined Ryan Solomon on the Genfinity podcast to explain why. His answer covered privacy, formal verification, and the machinery running underneath Solana today.
Solana Exclusive ⚡️ Helius Is Building the Most Scalable Privacy Layer in Crypto
— Generation Infinity (@Genfinity) August 7, 2026
"Everything you'd expect from a bank, you'll be able to do on Solana. Fully onchain. No compromises." – Mert, Founder & CEO of Helius
Genfinity Founder @IOV_OWL sat down with @Mert on the launch of… pic.twitter.com/buQR3zSfNC
Helius Built the Onramp, Then Bought the Cryptography
Helius operates as an infrastructure layer for Solana developers. The company supplies RPC access, historical data, and transaction tooling. Mumtaz started it roughly four years ago while working at Coinbase. At the time, he found the state of crypto frustrating. Capital moved in circles, and genuinely useful applications stayed rare.
Two reasons stood out to him. First, the chains simply did not scale. Second, building onchain demanded infrastructure that did not exist yet. Helius exists to remove that second obstacle. The stated goal is letting builders express ideas onchain quickly and cheaply.
In June 2026, Helius acquired Light Protocol. That team authored Solana’s original zero-knowledge syscalls, including the sol_poseidon hash function and altbn pairings. Light also co-developed ZK Compression, which cuts onchain state costs by up to 1,000x. Light CEO Jorrit Palfner framed the deal plainly. “Privacy is the single most important primitive we can build and scale on Solana,” he said.
Big Solana news:
— Helius (@Helius) June 10, 2026
The Light Protocol team is joining Helius to help build Solana's most complete ZK privacy layer.
Private payments, markets, and finance — at Solana scale.
Fully composable, fully onchain, fully open-source. pic.twitter.com/Ohn0MUB7p0
Crypto Does Not Even Have Banking-Level Privacy
Most people assume blockchains are already private. Mumtaz says that assumption is backwards, and institutions make it constantly. They expect the confidentiality they already get from banks.
He defines that baseline simply. Your bank knows who you are and knows your transaction history. You know it too. Meanwhile, another customer at that same bank knows nothing. Crypto does not clear that bar today. On a public chain, you know, the counterparty knows, and everyone else knows forever.
The compounding risk concerns him more than the disclosure itself. One accidental identity leak does not expose a single payment. Instead, it exposes an entire history. Additionally, every interaction with an already-identified wallet enriches the wider transaction graph. Transparency therefore produces a network effect of surveillance, and it strengthens over time.
Mumtaz also flagged the movie trope where criminals demand Bitcoin ransoms. He considers it absurd. Bitcoin is among the most traceable instruments ever built.
How the Solana Privacy Protocol Works
Helius calls the core primitive a privacy ring. Each ring is a Solana program, not a rollup or a sidechain. Settlement happens directly on Solana, so no new trust assumptions enter the picture.
Rings come in two modes. Confidential rings encrypt the asset and the amount while leaving sender and recipient visible. Anonymous rings encrypt sender, recipient, asset, and amount together. Operators then configure the controls they need. Available options include allowed assets, transfer thresholds requiring extra approval, allowlists and blocklists, freeze and thaw for investigations, and auditor visibility for regulators and accountants. Teams can bring their own compliance stack or use managed KYC and sanctions screening.
Helius plans two distribution paths. Institutions get bespoke rings tuned to their policies. Everyone else gets a permissionless public ring for encrypting balances and tokens. Mumtaz stressed that “public” here means openly accessible, not transparent.
Payroll illustrates the demand well. Mumtaz pointed to Squads, which will run a Helius ring for its Altitude business account product. Altitude has already processed more than $200 million in payments since launching publicly. Consequently, no company wants its full compensation table sitting onchain. Private borrowing and lending follow the same logic for institutions.
Encrypted Balances Remove the MEV Surface
One consequence of encryption gets less attention than it deserves. Encrypted balances and token types cannot be front-run, because searchers cannot read the order. Trading inside a ring therefore becomes MEV-proof by construction.
That property is not merely a convenience. Mumtaz noted that securities trading legally requires it in many contexts. Regulated venues cannot expose client orders to predatory sequencing.
He was candid about how the project started. He had already angel invested in essentially every Solana privacy protocol, and he did not want to build another one. Then he watched Solana lose deals to zero-knowledge rollups and competing enterprise chains. Building became a decision of last resort.
The differentiator he claims is architectural. Most privacy systems push computation off-chain or route it through a centralized obfuscator. Helius keeps everything onchain and composable with existing Solana liquidity and code.
The protocol is live on devnet and sits in private beta. Mumtaz expects mainnet next month, though he offered two months as a conservative estimate. Three audits are running in parallel, alongside formal verification of the ZK circuits.
AI Is Forcing Crypto Toward Pacemaker-Grade Code
Mumtaz sees the strongest AI and crypto overlap in security, not agent payments. Teams still ship protocol code the way consumer apps ship features. That habit does not survive contact with the stakes.
His analogy is blunt. A Facebook bug means a slow-loading photo, and a patch goes out immediately. A protocol bug means someone loses a billion dollars, permanently. Crypto code therefore resembles spaceflight software or pacemaker firmware. Once deployed, it must already be correct.
Recent events support the argument. In May 2026, researcher Taylor Hornby found a soundness bug in Zcash’s Orchard circuit using an AI-assisted audit. A missing constraint had sat undiscovered for roughly four years, despite extensive expert review. Zcash patched it through an emergency upgrade in June 2026. Shielded Labs then committed to formally verifying the circuit.
The cut runs both ways, and Mumtaz acknowledges it. AI accelerates offense against open-source code. Simultaneously, it makes formal verification practical at speeds that manual review never reached. He expects protocols to reach banking-grade guarantees as a result.
One-shot anything on Solana
— Helius (@Helius) March 4, 2026
Meet the Helius stack for agents:
– Claude Code Plugin
– MCP Server with 60+ tools
– Helius CLI with 95+ commands
– Skills for Helius, DFlow, Phantom, and SVM
– Supports all Helius APIs, staking, and tooling
Enjoy pic.twitter.com/9mtoiYJH5J
Solana’s Throughput Keeps Climbing Underneath
Several network upgrades landed while attention sat elsewhere. On July 29, 2026, SIMD-0286 raised Solana’s block compute limit from 60 million to 100 million compute units. That is a 66% capacity increase at epoch 1009. Notably, more than 70% of validators had adopted XDP networking beforehand, which reduced packet-processing overhead first.
Block times are next. Solana currently produces slots every 400 milliseconds. Alpenglow cuts that to 200 milliseconds and replaces Proof of History and Tower BFT with Votor and Rotor. Validators approved it with 98.27% support in September 2025. Community testing began in May 2026, and staged rollout runs from August through October 2026. Finality drops from roughly 12.8 seconds to between 100 and 150 milliseconds.
Monetary policy is moving too. SIMD-0550 proposes doubling Solana’s disinflation rate from 15% to 30%. Under that schedule, inflation reaches the 1.5% terminal rate by early 2029 instead of 2032. Estimates put the reduction near 18.9 million SOL over six years. The signaling window closes on August 18, 2026, and the vote threshold sits at 65.16 million SOL.
Why Mumtaz Argues Crypto Is Two Years Old
Crypto carries an odd contradiction, in his framing. It is the longest time-horizon industry in technology. Yet its loudest participants operate on the shortest possible horizons.
He rejects the standard rebuttal about Bitcoin’s age. Bitcoin has existed since 2009, certainly. However, programmable blockchains that genuinely scale have existed for roughly two years. He works on Solana and remembers when burst activity broke transaction landing. Regulatory clarity arrived on a similar timeline.
By his estimate, the industry sits at one to five percent of eventual adoption. Stablecoins lead the current wave. Prediction markets follow, though sports betting still dominates their volume. Perpetual futures increasingly serve as information instruments, pricing pre-IPO equity and geopolitical risk.
Self-custody remains the weak point he wants fixed. Most holders still leave assets on exchanges, because managing keys stays intimidating. That is a design problem, not a permanent condition. Meanwhile, the infrastructure work continues quietly, exactly as it did through 2022 and 2023.
*Disclaimer: News content provided by Genfinity is intended solely for informational purposes. While we strive to deliver accurate and up-to-date information, we do not offer financial or legal advice of any kind. Readers are encouraged to conduct their own research and consult with qualified professionals before making any financial or legal decisions. Genfinity disclaims any responsibility for actions taken based on the information presented in our articles. Our commitment is to share knowledge, foster discussion, and contribute to a better understanding of the topics covered in our articles. We advise our readers to exercise caution and diligence when seeking information or making decisions based on the content we provide.
