Recap · August 31, 2025 · 28:46
Mert: Why Solana Works, Internet Markets, Building in Crypto and More | TG Podcast
The Signal
Mert Mumtaz explains why he sees Solana as a candidate for broad internet markets: its hardest lessons came from real users, its infrastructure improved through the crashes, and the ambition extends beyond memecoins. The Helius founder also makes the case for public writing, a better developer experience, and treating competition as part of an infinite game.
Key Takeaways
- 01
RPC is the chain's telephone
Mert describes Helius as the infrastructure that lets wallets and apps read from and send transactions to Solana. Reliability and speed matter because an end user cannot readily distinguish an RPC outage from a chain outage.
- 02
Attention replaced sales
He says Helius spends nothing on marketing or sales; its public presence and technical writing bring teams in. Mert treats posting as a career asset and says the company has built trust by being constantly visible.
- 03
Memecoin volume taught Solana
The NFT and memecoin rush exposed failures under industrial-scale sniping, but gave engineers a concrete system to repair. Mert argues that performing in the next wave mattered more than avoiding activity altogether.
- 04
Internet markets need access
His vision is a market where an internet connection, rather than a brokerage account and KYC stack, lets people trade stocks, commodities, currencies, tokens, and other assets.
- 05
Winning is continued work
Mert rejects a final win condition for Solana. The chain must keep improving latency and product experience while becoming the place crypto founders expect to build.
On the Record
“We don't spend any money on marketing or sales. We never even reach out to teams. People just come to us because we built this brand of trust and I'm just everywhere.”
“Generally speaking, when it's money only, that tends to dry up and then you must have another loop. People must want to go there because of the social graph.”
“You just need an internet connection. And with the internet, you can participate in global markets.”
“The only way to win is to just keep playing. The only way to lose is to think you have won.”
The Breakdown
Helius behind the wallet
Mert introduces himself as the Dubai-based founder of Helius, a Solana RPC provider. He explains RPC in plain terms as the telephone between an app and the blockchain: a Phantom balance query and a token swap both depend on it. That makes infrastructure speed and uptime central, because users cannot easily distinguish an RPC outage from a chain outage. He says the company is Solana-only, while still calling himself a Hyperliquid fan.
Posting as distribution
Threadguy asks whether Mert's constant Twitter presence has mattered. Mert says it has helped his career even more than the company, though Helius has never needed conventional sales or marketing spend. People arrive because the firm has accumulated trust and because he is visible. Helius also deliberately invests in free, useful writing, he says, because crypto's education and information quality can be poor; its work was cited in a White House digital-asset report.
Creator coins need a social reason
On Zora's creator-coin model, Mert sees genuinely new mechanisms but not an entirely new category: Friendtech and BitClout came first. He welcomes experiments because crypto does not have an abundance of product-market-fit apps. The harder question is whether users will post there for reasons beyond money—whether the product can form a social graph that remains enjoyable when token incentives cool. Personally, he says the visual-first product is less compelling to him than writing.
Stress tests from snipers
Mert says memecoins and the earlier NFT cycle were important for Solana partly because they exposed what the network could not handle. He saw sophisticated, industrial setups trying to snipe launches—activity no chain had really been built for. Solana's outages became engineering signals: after FTX, he believed the coming fixes would let the network handle the next surge better. Memecoin trading supplied that test, and he says new upgrades should improve the trading experience again.
From tokens to internet markets
Mert's broader thesis is not simply internet capital markets but internet markets. He points to onchain stocks, where someone can swap into Tesla, Nvidia, or Apple through Solana venues, alongside uranium, gold, dollars, euros, RWAs, and tokens. The intended advantage is direct participation with an internet connection, rather than separate brokerage accounts and KYC processes. In his framing, larger, concentrated markets gain liquidity and become better at reflecting sentiment and truth.
Network effects and the long game
The largest risk is not an existential technical flaw, Mert says, but entrenched network effects: Ethereum still has assets, TVL, stablecoin volume, and an Excel-like familiarity for people dealing with money. He respects competition from Hyperliquid and Coinbase, but says a challenger needs a much better experience, not a marginally better one. He declined several offers to become a Solana treasury-company figure, preferring to build technology, improve developer experience, and close bigger contracts.
A decentralized Nasdaq, without a finish line
Mert says he never considered taking Helius cross-chain after FTX because its customer numbers contradicted claims that Solana's developer base had vanished. His north star is a decentralized Nasdaq: thousands of computers functioning as one, with the speed and product quality needed for frictionless markets. His personal side mission is to make Solana feel like Silicon Valley to a crypto founder—the default place to build because of its founder app and community support.
Distilled from the episode transcript · Counterparty Recap Desk
