Thanks to the 2 new subscribers from last week on ‘The Decentralised Data Stack’. We are continuing the theme this week by speaking to Mert from Helius. Helius is an all-in-one solution to building the best developer experience in the Solana ecosystem. If you enjoy these posts and want them weekly in your inbox, please share and subscribe below… now to the post!
Welcome back to MondayMunday, my blog on all things fintech and crypto. Today we have The Intersection, where I chat with fintech/blockchain founders to uncover what they are working on and why they are essential to bridging crypto and the real world.
Intersection /ˌin(t)ərˈsekSH(ə)n/ noun. Where finance and blockchains meet to create endless new possibilities and products to better serve financial systems.
Last week I was fortunate to have a 30-minute chat with Mert Mumtaz about his new project Helius, who recently raised a $3.1M seed round from the likes of ChapterOne and Reciprocal Ventures. Watch the interview to understand Mert’s view on building to future of infrastructure on Solana or follow our commentary below.
What is Helius?
Helius is building an all-in-one developer tooling vertically focused on the Solana ecosystem, following this they are then expanding to other chains. This ranges from RPC calls, webhooks, APIs and SDKs to streamline development, this is in comparison to other solutions that are either:
Generalist solutions ported from other chains. An example may be Moralis and their API offering for Solana.
Solana-specific solutions for certain infrastructure niches. An example is Syndica and their dedicated Solana RPC tooling.
Helius aims to be an all-in-one platform providing indexing of the blockchain, RPC, API and webhook infrastructure in one tool to empower builders. This simplifies the development journey as it creates a lot of the tooling taken for granted in the Ethereum ecosystem and recreates it with Solana-specific features.
The need for node infrastructure abstraction?
As discussed in a previous blog on blockchain infrastructure providers, node access is how developers read and write to a blockchain. As Mert points out in our interview “RPC to nodes are table stakes” for developers as this is how they access the blockchain. However, to further improve the developer experience on blockchains, we need tooling that makes data human readable, indexes data to make it fast and developer SDKs to abstract away some set-up and operational complexity.
Helius aims to do this in one platform, this is a change from the myriad of tools developers often use to manage node infrastructure, APIs and SDK usage which can be cumbersome and lead to data syncing issues (this is where one tool isn’t using the latest data from the ledger, leading to data being different between tools).
Helius also provides extra services such as parsing blockchain data to make it human readable so instead of seeing transaction hashes, you can see further metadata on transactions e.g. whether or not it was a DAO vote for example.
These advancements increase the speed and ease for developers to onboard onto the Solana ecosystem.
The need for specialist tooling?
Whilst certain tooling can be ported from chain to chain due to the nature that all blockchains have the same distributed design dynamics. However, ultimately each chain is fundamentally different, this is especially true with non-EVM chains like Solana. This poses a new set of challenges when building infrastructure.
An example of this challenge Geyser plugins in the Solana ecosystem, this plugin helps nodes serve data quickly for certain RPC requests when under heavy load. To provide a best-in-class developer experience with speed and reliability, understanding the minutia and detail of a chain is essential.
This can be extrapolated to the whole development experience, by building from the ground up on one chain, Helius can provide a dedicated developer experience.
History of the team
The team are experienced blockchain builders and cloud infrastructure specialists. Mert, the CEO, was previously at Coinbase creating their transactions and balances infrastructure. Additionally, other members of the team have experience scalling cloud infrastructure at AWS. Mert points to this expertise as their way to manage costs and build a robust and scalable technology stack for users.
Why Solana?
Solana choice was apparent to the team due to the community nature, in the early days when at Coinbase, Mert’s research on the Solana ecosystem was compounded by a vibrant community with Chase Barker, the Head of the Developer Ecosystem, actively engaging talented builders in the space.
Furthermore, Mert points to the speed and development of Solana as a key motivation to build on Solana. Whilst many L2s and new L1s are springing up, Solana is one of the few to gain mass traction whilst being robust at scale.
These two factors point to a need for a solution like Helius to exist to empower developers and be the point of entry for enterprises if Solana adoption continues.
GTM Advice?
Helius aims to be the key tool kit for hobbyist builders with their freemium model, but with their robust RPC clients, webhooks and APIs they are opening up the Solana ecosystem for a new wave of enterprise and institutional use cases. For example, Jump trading is building a new Solana client which may pave way for further institutional interest in the chains, with this, robust developer tools like Helius will be needed to ease interaction with blockchain data.
Additionally, the focus on a single chain provides clarity over their growth plans and they aim to build a new community focussed approach around developer experiences for Solana.
Thoughts for Builders?
Helius represents an interesting case of focusing on underserved developer experience with an extreme focus on a specific problem. The Solana-focused approach allows them to build a service which can better serve users, despite a crowded marketplace for developer tooling in general in the blockchain space.
Additionally, building great infrastructure plays where major developer activity is happening is a great way to find initial traction and capitalise on the success of projects who find product-market fit.
Timestamps for the interview:
Start - 1.54 - Introduction and what is Helius.
1.54 - 3.56 - The approach of a full-stack developer solution and the uniqueness of Solana.
3.56 - 6.34 - Why did they choose Solana?
6.34 - 9.27 - Approach to building scalable infrastructure.
9.27 - 13.42 - What makes Helius unique in the market?
13.42 - 17.18 - How do they approach GTM?
17.18 - 18.19 - The use cases for Helius?
18.19 - End - Closing and how to contact the team.
If you are a fintech builder or investor feel free to reach me by replying to this email or DM on Twitter or LinkedIn, I’d love to chat! 🙏
