E179: Helius CEO: These 3 Crypto Coins Are MASSIVELY Underpriced (2026 Cycle)

0:00Solana is very clearly the obvious choice. So how come people aren't seeing it this way? It's because you're getting your source from CT and CT is dominated by traders. And what do traders know? A trader can always make money by following the wave and maybe seeing certain things earlier than others. But fundamentally, the people who are actually deep down in the ecosystem are the ones who can get enough conviction at$8. What's the thesis for Solana in 2026? Since it's a general chain. Mert Mumtaz, the co-founder and CEO of Helios.

0:27Mert Mumtaz:a leading infrastructure provider for Solana, a builder advancing internet native capital markets and blockchain innovation. A few friends asked me to look at the new scaling roadmap that Zcash has. It was out of the top 100 as a coin. And I looked at it and I was like, oh, shit, that is actually quite interesting. But just like Solana at$8, Zcash at$18 was the exact same thing. I don't do this game of what's everybody talking about and then maybe let's do some rotation games. It's more like, does it have the physics? Does it have the incentives? If the answer is yes, then that's your edge. I don't hold any NIR coin.

0:56What am I failing to understand? I don't think NIR is there today, but I do think NIR has a lot of potential. It's not as high of a conviction plate that I have with Zcash and Solana. But first of all, what are the set of things that you want to look at when you're evaluating a project? But if you look at crypto as a whole, it is one of the only things that stands out to me for how undervalued it is compared to the things above it. Solana has all the talk the last two cycles. And you tell us, while the token was down only, what has been happening behind the scenes to prepare the ecosystem for the future.

1:26Yes, well...

1:31Hi everyone. This is the little bit that I know none of you like that can help us make a huge difference for this show and we want to take it next. 71 % of the people who regularly watch When Shift Happens have not subscribed. And so all I'd ask you if you want to make a huge difference is the following. If you've seen this show before and you like it, help me help my team hit the subscribe button and we'll continue to build this show for you thank you how are you doing uh i'm a little sick to be honest uh nothing infectious just stomach but um otherwise good life is good still on the zines i i i cycle i'm on it sometimes i'm on not on and sometimes because otherwise it's just you build up a tolerance what do you do when you're not on zins what else do you take or do

2:24just coffee coffee yeah a lot of coffee yeah until 4 or 5 a.m no i have a routine i go from coffee and then black tea and then green tea and then diet coke but you have this i mean i don't know if it's true i was talking with um um one of the zcash guys he was telling me you don't you you have this sleep cycle where you work at night is it still the case is it what still the case yes so you work until like 5 from zcash dev maybe zuko shop whatever uh yeah i mean uh because arjun oh yeah arjun um yeah i mean arjun is completely opposite he goes about like 8 p.m it's actually crazy but like invite people over in Dubai and then like everyone will just start and he's like I'm going to bed but yeah we start I go to bed at like 4 or 5 a.m.

3:23usually is it like the some people say ADHD brain works better at night oh for this is what you have well it works better for some things it doesn't work better for other things for writing and creativity which is useful in marketing and Twitter and even writing memos to the team or strategy docs. I think it's useful to do stuff at night. For super analytical stuff, like actually looking at the numbers, it's better to do in the morning. Anyway, did we? You're one. Huh? You're one. Oh, shit. Okay, I did not know that. One, but we'll cut like whatever is interesting. Okay. How do you have a relationship when you have these weird sleep cycles?

4:14If you have a girlfriend whose cycle is like Arjun, you never meet. That's why the relationship is amazing. No problems. It is difficult for sure. I think just being in a relationship is difficult as a CEO. especially in crypto which is a global thing and it's a remote company as well right but i'm also not i also do other things on top of being a ceo of helios obviously i need to advocate for solana and zcash and people don't see almost 99 of the things i do but that's mostly behind the scenes of unblocking things getting things listed and i think just in general being a relationship for the other person uh for the partner is difficult because my attention is very spiky in in how it's directed right sometimes i can give attention but sometimes i'm at a family dinner let's say and then i get paged and it's hard to describe like hey if i don't get this then 90 of the solana ecosystem is going to be in trouble and as a result so will my team and And as a result, sold my revenue.

5:34And as a result, we might die. There's all these considerations that are hard to reason about unless you're in that seat. What do you do? Do you explain or just say, guys, I don't have time now, so I need to go? Without sounding like an asshole. It is really hard to do without sounding like an asshole just because I'm already foreign. And so I have a naturally unwarm demeanor, let's say. but I think it's what once it's something I said up front I say we can do all sorts of these different things but the one boundary is that when I need to work I need to work it's nothing personal it's just I liken it to having a child or a baby if the baby is crying at night somebody has to deal with it it obviously can't be you it's my baby in this case which is the company and so you either take care of the baby or the baby kills itself in some way or just completely breaks everything in the house and so it's really no different than that i'll have extra practice for when we actually have kids in dealing with random fires all the time are you not going to be one of those who says hey my baby is the business our baby is your baby i need to sleep sometimes i don't have time no no definitely not i think If you're having an actual child, then the child needs its father just as much as its mother.

7:04Now, obviously, that might look different depending on the expectations you set up. Some people are more traditional. Some people are not.

7:15But I would like my children to be extremely, extremely, way more successful than I ever was. and so they come first for sure since we last spoke i think last time we spoke was about six to nine months ago you have now like six times more followers on x like 1.2 million i saw some people saying oh is that possible is an industry plant are you of course yes that's why i joined in 2020 and everything broke. Well, it's because, so when you make a new account on X now, they rolled out these things called starter packs. So how that works is back in the day, they used to just make you follow topics.

8:09So whether it's cryptocurrency or World Cup or politics, now they give you, when you click one of those they give you a list of five to ten accounts that are recommended for that and I'm on the crypto list so when you let's say you're a new account you say you're interested in crypto then it's a starter pack of me Anatoly Vitalik I think Raj Robert Leshner from compound and I think a few other people and then myself. So it's just, it's a very good top of funnel. The best. Yes.

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9:37However you want to invest in crypto, the experts at Bitwise have you covered. Solana was all the talk the last two cycles. The first cycle you were not in yet, at least not as a builder like you are now. In 2020-21, Sol did like a 500x. It was mostly speculation on narratives, FTX, SBF, mostly speculation on the token. Went up to like$260, went down to$8, which is more or less when you decided to go in the ecosystem. Then it rose from the hashes, 2023. Then we had this crazy cycle, which was fundamentally driven with activity, but still mostly based on speculation mainly meme coins token went from like eight to three hundred dollars and now the token went down another i think 80 back to 60 but some stuff has been happening in solana can you tell us why the token was down only and so many people calling so enough dead again what has been happening behind the scenes to prepare Solana and the ecosystem for the future?

11:00Yes, well, first, I wasn't very well known on the first Solana cycle, but I was still in the ecosystem. So, for example, Helios raised seed funding in late 21. So we were already building things there, except I was mostly focused on NFTs and bots and arbitrage and all sorts of different things and writing salon educational things. And then when the SPF thing happened, that just gave me a lot of ammo. So I felt like it was target practice. I was just in the ring and then all of a sudden all these dummies started popping up for me just hit in the face with some facts and so that was just a good moment or good opportunity so as far as why the token went down well there's a few things here one is it's obviously the case that everything went down so I was so funny enough this whole time I've been vibe coding a project called Chuck Price.

12:10So when Opus first came out, the day it came out, I started using it. And then I was vibe coding prediction markets. And I bought this domain called chuckprice.com just for the memes. And then as I was vibe coding it, I have to check the price all the time, right? Because it's only job is to show you the prices. And every day I look at the site and the total crypto market cap is like 3 trillion, 2.9 trillion, 2.7 trillion. Every day, it's just check price, awful price. And obviously, Bitcoin went from, I believe, a high of 120 to obviously as low as 57 or something around this range. And since I was extremely focused on

13:00developer activity on solana but also in terms of investments obviously zcash was actually doing very well so the entire market went from i think the market lost about two trillion in market cap combined but zcash went from 18 to like 600 and then it went down again then it's so like it's been i haven't really felt the pain so to speak and so So at first, I was a little late to feeling the pain on Solana. Obviously, Solana with the rise of hyperliquid as well. So a few things happened, right? Obviously, crypto just as a market went down entirely. But then also two things happened. One is geopolitical instability.

13:45And why that's important is because that allowed people to speculate on things they couldn't speculate on before. So oil, for example, right? Imagine how interesting it is for traders to just leverage trade oil without KYC on the Internet based off of monitoring the situation on Iran or whatever Trump tweets and all sorts of different geopolitical considerations, right? So that's this addictive loop that makes you feel engaged. And so Hyperliquid obviously enabled that. But then also you have all these AI companies that are getting colossal in private rounds and they're about to go public. And so you have the pre-IPO price discovery for a lot of these stocks.

14:36And so that's another place where perps are perfectly suited because you can just speculate on the price and maybe that helps with true price discovery. I think like the cerebrous price discovery before their IPO was actually shown on the NASDAQ from TradeXYZ, right? That's pretty awesome. And so those things are happening. Hyperliquid is getting a lot of attention. The market is going down. And then there's concerns of Sol's monetary policies, but also how does it compete with Hyperliquid and all sorts of these things. And obviously, I also maybe stopped talking about Solana as much. I was still talking about the boring stuff, which most people don't care about, like the building and the data infrastructure.

15:25Really, it's a ton of products in that meantime, by the way. And so that CT is very much a high school cafeteria. It's people, it's monkey see, monkey do. Somebody copies somebody else's sentiments and now it's everybody else's sentiments. independent thinking is very rare. And so that, and then obviously there were leadership changes at Solana Foundation. Many people seem to have missed this or maybe didn't care about it as much as the Ethereum one, because everybody talks about the EF Foundation leadership changes, but Solana had probably just as big of a change. Now it wasn't a net outflux on Solana, it was more like a rotation so to speak right so a lot of the super highly competent people so my favorite guy is akshay who you probably know um he stepped down for example after breakpoint and that was actually i was very concerned about that because i was like akshay is like me too the smartest guy i know with like the best messaging he's one he's one of the reason i i put 80 of my portfolio in solely in 2023 in summer because I talked to him and I was like, this guy did like Uber IPO.

16:39He's like Balaji's right arm. He's like mega smart, mega high signal, low noise. Like, and now he's leaving. I was like, shit, like this is bad. What do I do with my soul? That was my, well, I wasn't like this, you know, I wasn't thinking about portfolio allocation, but I was like, oh, this is actually kind of, that's not great because actually I would say is He's the most competent foundation type person that I've seen in all of crypto. And it's not even close. He's also a good friend. And for example, he's the one who basically convinced me to pull the trigger on moving out of Canada. So he's very good at sort of telling stories.

17:20And for example, he came up with Internet Capital Markets, ICM, right? That was all him. He's the one who organized Breakpoint, all these different things. Anyway, so I was like, oh, shit. and um just one more thing sorry he's the one who came a bit less than a year and a half ago and said kavin there's only two projects that re-interest me today solana and zcash that was a year and a half ago yes yes uh i would say on the zcash part this is the time where i returned the favor of convincing him uh it wasn't just me of course there's a whole community around it biology is also interested right um but anyway so you you take all those different things the leadership changes and the hyperliquids rise and and then you know certain builders expanding chains and certainly we've been offered this as well people were paying us offering us money to expand different chains and so i really i was doing some thinking and i was like okay what do we do here, right?

18:20And basically, I came to the conclusion that, okay, look, I always look to Jeff Bezos for basically advice on most company related things. And so I looked at myself, and the facts, and I thought, okay, here's how to think about this. There's only two things that are important, that are fundamentally important. One is physics, and two is incentives. And what I mean by that is assuming a blockchain is structured such that it doesn't fight physics. So for example, I would argue that Ethereum's L2 approach fights physics because if you don't scale the core engine, then fundamentally you're limiting the scaling of everything else.

19:06And so you're moving physics around, but you're not actually improving. It'll come back at you at some point unless you tackle it head on. And then number two is incentives, meaning if you have an ecosystem where the sum of the individual parts is actually greater than the whole that's really what you want because the alternative is for example ethereum l1 loses value capture to the l2s but then the l2s don't benefit from one of the other l2s succeeding and so they're in this knife fight against each other and it's this weird incentive game but on solana for example you saw this with a bunch of the recent launches like world xyz where it is in my best interest as just a random rpc provider for world xyz to succeed so i help distribute them okay well so do the wallets so does a foundation so do the dexes and basically the entire ecosystem can incentivize amongst themselves such that the sum of the parts is greater than the whole And so you have those two things.

20:16And then the only thing remaining are soluble problems that require entrepreneurs and builders to push forward. Right. That's all that's needed at that point. And so this is where my framing of what I want Salon to look like is sort of a global Silicon Valley, where to build a business on chain, whether it's about money markets, capitalism, finance, whatever it might be, you just have an internet connection. And you get a Helios plan or whatever, you join super team or whatever you want to do. And you just write code and you build a business and you solve a problem. regardless of your background you can be from bangladesh you can be from estonia it does not matter what your name is where your father was all these different things and you can succeed on pure meritocracy but then you're also helping the entire ecosystem just on top of yourself as well and so that's how i thought about it and i said okay clearly this is a soluble problem because we have the two hardest things already on our side and those things are impossible or highly unlikely to replicate, right?

21:29I don't see any sign of anybody else coming close to replicating those. Now, people will say Hyperliquid and Hyperliquid certainly could. But as it stands today, Hyperliquid is a great exchange and a trading platform. I compare it much more to perhaps a much better Binance than a very successful blockchain, which I don't even think there's been really a successful blockchain, so to speak. It's sort of been changing. The ball has been being thrown around every different cycle. And so, for example, if you look at HyperCore, the blockchain itself, it doesn't really do too much. It's more about using the exchange to get front-end integrators to distribute via builder codes like Phantom and all these different things.

22:20And that's perfectly valid, by the way. But it's a fundamentally different thing than a neutral, scalable blockchain where it's just a different model, which is to say you can obviously. So people at that time would ask me, what does Solana need to do to compete with Hyperliquid? And I would say that's actually the wrong question because Solana doesn't compete with Hyperliquid. What would happen is Solana needs to organize the chain such that builders on top of Solana have everything they need to then compete with Hyperliquid. Right. That's all that's required for Solana because Solana Foundation is certainly not a quant mastermind like Jeff.

23:06right they cannot compete there anyway it's not their core competence totally score competence is scaling blockchains and distributed systems so that's what you focus on and then you get folks like eugene and jerry from phoenix and whoever else going into the future and if you if you if you make the chain such that it has enough liquidity enough builders enough integrations and distribution all these different things then you've shifted the numbers in terms of well somebody could build the next hyperliquid here right that's what you want for an l1 and i don't think the answer to whether a team could compete with hyperliquid on solana last year was yes because the chain didn't work well enough right people most people aren't technical so they don't see the fine details but for example if you were um building a risk engine for example on solana you'd have to take some weird shortcuts such that the fundamental tech wouldn't be as competitive in the in the final stage and so there was a lot of bugs that we ironed out to make it such that okay now it's in a place where a team can come and try to compete with hyperliquid or they don't have to compete with hyperliquid they can just take a different approach maybe they're more maybe they just want to do forex perks or something maybe they have different opinions right but that's the goal of Solana.

24:28And so then the only thing that matters at that point is, first of all, are new startups coming to Solana? Or are they abandoning Solana? And I'm an angel investor, and I get all sorts of deal flow. And at some point, I saw a big uptick in the number of new pitches right so everybody's saying everything is dead uh and this happened the past two cycles but what i look at is one the developer numbers because i own a developer platform and then two is the number of startups because the the trader mind does not see those deals right they don't see oh mert got pitched 50 times this week on like different startups so they have no idea that there is tremendous builder interest and so that is all to say when did you start seeing this uptick maybe a month I would say mid spring maybe I would say mid spring around heading into Miami consensus and where do you think that comes from well people give me shit for this but i think fundamentally so like if you're building a business on chain today if you need to enable any sort of crypto functionality what are your choices okay like seriously what are your choices you're not going to use bitcoin almost certainly not are you gonna use base i mean base was down three times last week and also do you trust coinbase and also is there enough liquidity there is there enough builders there and and you know obviously they'll say yes and and i think they have like a sufficient amount but is that the best place to do it okay so then what else do you have sui maybe but uh it's still quite early and is also going down a lot because scaling is hard as solana found out years ago and okay so then fundamentally you arrive at this thing where it's like okay you have to do on hyperliquid in which case you're pretty limited in the types of things you can build because it's an exchange fundamentally or you have solana where you can build anything it doesn't have to just be an exchange you can you can build payments you can build collectibles you can build literally anything but then you also have this global uh this global movement of tons of founders that are in person and on the internet through super team you have four or five accelerators you have totally personally quote tweeting you yes you have developer infrastructure and and we have a startup program where we give people eight months of free credits so that they can build their businesses.

27:32So you have all these and you have, for example, if you want to look at track record, well, let's look at the last kind of few giant companies in crypto. Axiom, Pumpfun, Magic Eden, Phantom, right? Jupiter. Now, they're not all on Solana, but compared to Solana's market cap versus the others certainly the highest per capita of greatest companies come from solana and so then you look at it that way and you're like okay so solana is very clearly the obvious choice so how come people aren't seeing it this way well it's because you're getting your source from ct and ct is dominated by traders and what do traders know price is now right that's it that's it they don't know about What is done is dead.

28:21Correct. And that's why they're always... My thesis on this is that a trader can always make money by being sort of... By following the wave and maybe seeing certain things earlier than others. But fundamentally, the people who are actually deep down in the ecosystem are the ones who can get enough conviction at$8. Right. And then once you get that, and then CT can have all the big traders making calls and stuff. but fundamentally they're always kind of following what's happening they're a lagging indicator

28:56Mert Mumtaz:right my job is pretty good at that too because i talked to the yes to the guys right so i know i actually tells me hey look into zikash a year and a half ago then he's like hey do you want to do zuko and i'm like yeah let's do it but then zuko is in the middle of the u.s and because i do only in person then we don't do it yes then you come last year in uh september you say hey kevin z cash and i'm like oh yeah no z cash is a good great example of this where the frameworks i just mentioned which is the incentives and the physics and so you look at i looked uh the way i got into it was and i think i said this on the last podcast is a few friends asked me to look at the new scaling roadmap that Zcash has.

29:42And this was maybe late 24, early 25 or something. Price was like, it was out of the top 100 as a coin. And I looked at it and I was like, oh, shit, that is actually quite interesting. This could scale. It does solve a meaningful problem that people are completely sleeping on. And all you need to do is tell the story properly such that other people are aware while executing. So, you know, just like Solana at$8, Zcash at$18 was the exact same thing. Nier was the exact same thing. These are all, I don't do this game of, well, what's everybody talking about? And then maybe let's do some rotation games.

30:22It's more like, does it have the physics? Does it have the incentives? Is it a distressed asset? Is it slept on? Is there asymmetric upside given that basically nobody knows what they're talking about? If the answer is yes, then that's your edge. Quick shout-outs to our legendary long-term WhenShift Appents partners, without whom none of this would be possible. Thank you to Cast, my go-to global money app to store, earn, move, and spend stablecoins across 170 plus countries directly with Apple Pay or a physical card. On top of that, I can also get paid in USD and Euro with my Cast virtual account.

31:01Use my promo code SHIFT and my link below to get 10 % off your membership, earn up to 3 % instant USD cashback on every card spend and get up to$250 in cash for referring your friends. No banks, no borders, just money that moves with you with stable cash rewards. Thank you, Treasure. My favorite cold wallet to store my Bitcoin and crypto and make sure I sleep well at night. If you want to sleep well at night too, you can order your treasure wallet with my promo code WSH10 and get a 10 % discount. Check out my treasure link in the description down below. What's the thesis in a nutshell for Solana in 2026 that would get people excited again?

31:51with with solana the there's one of its problems has been that since it's a general chain so for example with hyperliquid you can very easily make the case that people will always want to speculate and they'll want to trade binance exists coinbase exists robinhood exists but now you can do it in this crypto forward way where there's a token the team makes the revenue in that token or or whatever and then they buy back the token and burn it very simple with solana since you have so many different options it becomes very difficult to meme it in the same way right with zcash it's extremely simple it's private money that's it bitcoin digital gold with solana i say that the the frame from earlier which is that it's a global silicon valley which is to say it's the most usable scalable and battle-tested chain with the highest concentration of products startups and talent okay so then the usual objection is something like so what so maybe even if i agree with you that solana is going to be the most used chain and maybe it'll power tons of things that i use in my everyday financial life why should i invest in the token right and i would say historically that has

33:30been to to to give weight to the critics i think that's a valid criticism because so for example if you ask that question atoli what will he say he'll say something like well the token is for spam preventing spam such that we can ration resources correctly and it's like yes that's technically true but that's not super interesting that's why him to stop tweeting yeah and i do that a lot by the way yeah i know i see you all the time stop tweeting please i had him on i mean actually you did an introduction like i think it was a year plus ago and he was saying i don't i don't really care about the talking yeah stop tweeting stop talking it's like a metallic uh He's like a more pragmatic Vitalik where like they'll just, their brains operate on such different dimensions, which is how they were able to build these systems to begin with, that they don't care, for example, what the dentist's investment thesis is.

34:36We have this meme in crypto where it's like, if you can't sell it to the dentist, then it's too complex. Gavin Wood is the same, by the way. He's like, I don't care. I just want to build the best tech all these guys they have this very complex different brain very abstracted brain and they just say how do I build this thing that helped the world get into a better place not how do I make people rich yeah yeah no and I totally get it because I was like that as well and when you don't need money for example it's very easy to be like that they're all billionaires So I don't care if whatever all I care is that the thing works and it lasts after I'm dead and all these different things.

35:22That's that's really cool. That's what gives me satisfaction. OK, that's great. However, for to actually work, you need to organize capital and capital in terms of humans and money and cash. and so then you need to get into kind of CEO mode into into wartime kind of general mode to be like okay so what is the story here like why should people actually put their money in this thing and so depending on who you ask there will always be different sort of answers for example Ansem will say something like well in a world where all these on on chain you know we're onboarding all these different people and retail attention is back and all these different things like how could the most used chain not benefit from that right and so he'll give a price target or for example i was on his podcast yesterday he said ethereum's all-time high in market cap which is like 600 billion would put solana at like 990 or something and he thinks that's reasonable i think like just by that logic it's probably reasonable but there is no real things that connect the dots.

36:34Okay. So I have a different take on this. So there's a few ways to think about it. Okay. So imagine a world in which Solana, what I'm saying is true. Solana is the most used chain and it's where price discovery happens and you're doing tokenized stocks trading and you're trading Pokemon cards and you're settling stable coin transactional different things. Well, in all those things, you have competition across the big boys, right? Whether that is a Citadel, whether that is Jane Street, whether that is a Singapore Bank, all these different things. And the way, and this already happens in the traditional finance world, where you pay to get edge into market information or do the trade before others.