Former Helius engineer describes founder Mert Mumtaz as toxic in lengthy X post
The former chief infrastructure engineer of Helius, Miles Smith, accused the founder of Hélius Mert Mumtaz of false business declaration, toxicity at work and to try to sabotage his career after leaving Helius in 2023.
In a long article X published on January 30, 2025, Smith said, among other things, that Mumtaz had stolen the intellectual property of the winning team in a Solana (GROUND) Hackathon in 2023, shouted of verbal abuses in a business supplier and used deceptive tactics to distort Helius’ technical capacity in a way that swelled its appearance. Finally, said Smith, Mumtaz returned it constructively and began to actively obstruct the efforts to collect subsequent funds for its new startup.
According to Smith, the genesis of his dispute with Mumtaz came from what he described as an “unconventional” corporate structure in Helius, where Mumtaz hired a C team composed only of old Coinbase and AWS engineers without any experience of level C anterior. He claims that when he suggested that more experience was necessary, Mumtaz took him as a threat and began to lay the foundations for his constructive dismissal.
Theft of intellectual property and toxicity at work
In the article, Smith referred to the infrastructure and tools GrizzlythonThe Hackathon Solana 2023, where Xray arrived second with his explorer Solana Block readable by man. According to him, although Mumtaz has already welcomed and financed team XRAY earlier which should have had a conflict of interest, Mumtaz was authorized to vote, which allowed the team at least partially to finish second.
Subsequently, he said that Mumtaz claimed Xray as a Helius product and informed the team they had received by being part of the Hackathon winners. Smith also said that he had witnessed Mumtaz Scream Abuse in a Cloudflare sales representative because he was not satisfied with the price of a corporate package.
False business declaration and post-Hélius career sabotage
Because of what he implicit was a recruitment policy lower than the hiring of incompetent AWS engineers, Smith said that Hélius was not lacking in several areas of technical performance and masked poor performance using paid services Like Quicknode to do the real work he pretended to claim to do.
This counts because this is how Helius claims to have the best time of availability, when they really have internal shit availability and mask it by paying Quicknode to take over.
Finally, said Smith, his relationship with Mumtaz deteriorated to the point where he was dismissed by SMS during his son’s baseball match. Smith said it took an additional 6 weeks to ensure that Helius honors his last pay check. Subsequently, Smith revealed, many of his fundraising attempts for his startup hit a brick wall once investors who expressed lively interest reach Mumtaz for a reference.
In 2024, Eaiis raised A series of financing of $ 9.5 million to help pass its number of heads of 14 full -time employees to at least 18, including 4 new engineers.
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