Former Helius lead infrastructure engineer Miles Smith has accused Helius founder Mert Mumtaz of corporate misrepresentation, workplace toxicity, and attempting to sabotage his career after he left Helius in 2023.
In a lengthy X article posted on January 30, 2025, Smith claimed, among other things, that Mumtaz stole intellectual property from the winning team at a Solana (SOL) hackathon in 2023, screamed verbal abuse at a corporate vendor, and used deceptive tactics to misrepresent the technical capacity of Helius in a way that inflated its appearance. Eventually, Smith said, Mumtaz constructively dismissed him and began actively obstructing subsequent fundraising efforts for his new startup.
According to Smith, the genesis of his dispute with Mumtaz stemmed from what he described as an “unconventional” corporate structure at Helius, where Mumtaz hired a C-team made up of only former Coinbase and AWS engineers without any prior C-level experience. He claims that when he suggested that more experience was needed, Mumtaz took it as a threat, and began laying the groundwork for his constructive dismissal.
Intellectual property theft and workplace toxicity
In the article, Smith referenced the Infrastructure and Tools track at Grizzlython, the 2023 Solana hackathon, where Xray came second with its human-readable Solana block explorer. According to him, despite Mumtaz having already hosted and funded the Xray team earlier which should have counted as a conflict of interest, Mumtaz was allowed to vote, which helped at least partially in helping the team finish second.
Subsequently he said, Mumtaz claimed Xray as a Helius product and informed the team that they had received payment for it by being among the Hackathon winners. Smith also claimed that he subsequently witnessed Mumtaz scream abuse at a female Cloudflare sales rep because he was unhappy with the price of an Enterprise package.
Corporate misrepresentation and post-Helius career sabotage
Due to what he implied was a subpar recruitment policy of hiring incompetent AWS engineers, Smith claimed that Helius was falling short on multiple technical performance areas, and was masking the mediocre performance by using paid services like QuickNode to do the actual work it was pretending to do.
This matters because this is how Helius pretends to have the best uptime, when really they have shitty internal uptime and mask it by paying QuickNode to pick up the slack.
Eventually, Smith said, his relationship with Mumtaz deteriorated to the point where he got fired by text while attending his son’s baseball game. Smith claimed that it took a further 6 weeks to get Helius to honor his final paycheck. Subsequently, Smith revealed, many of his fundraising attempts for his startup have hit a brick wall once investors who have expressed keen interest reach out to Mumtaz for a reference.
In 2024, Helius raised a $9.5 million Series A funding round to help grow its head count from 14 full time staff to at least 18, including 4 new engineers.
