Former Helius Lead Infrastructure Engineer Miles Smith has accused the founder of Helius Mertz of business declaration, toxicity in the workplace and trying to sabotage his career after he left Helius in 2023.
In a long X article posted on January 30, 2025, Smith claimed, among other things, that Mumtaz Intellectual Property of the winning team stole in a Solana (SOL) Hackathon in 2023, shouted verbal abuse at a business supplier and abused deceptive tactics for the technical Capacity of Helius incorrectly in a way that has blown up the appearance. Eventually, Smith said, Mumtaz rejected him constructively and started actively hindering the subsequent fundraising for his new startup.
According to Smith, the emergence of his dispute with Mumtaz stemmed what he described as an “unconventional” business structure in Helius, where Mumtaz rented a C-team consisting of only former Coinbase and AWS engineers without earlier C-level experience . He claims that when he suggested that more experience was needed, Mumtaz considered it a threat and began to lay the foundation for his constructive dismissal.
Intellectual property Theft and toxicity in the workplace
In the article, Smith referred to the infrastructure and tools – track GrizzlythonThe 2023 Solana Hackathon, where Xray became second with his human-readable Solana Block Explorer. According to him, despite the fact that Mumtaz had already hosted and financed the Xray team, which should have been counted as a conflict of interest, Mumtaz was allowed to vote, which at least partially helped to help the team second.
Then he said, Mumtaz claimed Xray as a Helius product and informed the team that they had paid for it by being one of the Hackathon winners. Smith also claimed that he witnessed Mumtaz Scream Abuse at a female Cloudflare seller because he was unhappy with the price of an Enterprise package.
Wrong presentation of companies and post-Helius career-sabotage
Because of what he implied, an insufficient recruitment policy of hiring incompetent AWS seniores, Smith claimed that Helius fell on multiple technical achievements and the mediocre performance masked by using paid services such as Quicknode to do the actual work it was pretended That it did that it did that it did that it did that it did that it did that it pretended it was pretending it did that it did that it did. Doing.
This is important because this is how Helius pretends to have the best uptime, while they really have shitty internal uptime and masking by paying Quicknode to pick up the play.
In the end, Smith said, his relationship with Mumtaz deteriorated to the point that he was fired by text while attending his son’s baseball game. Smith claimed that it took another 6 weeks to allow Helius to honor his last salary. Subsequently, Smith, many of his fundraising attempts before his startup, unveiled a brick wall hit as soon as investors who have shown a sharp interest, MUMTAZ reaches for a reference.
In 2024, Helius collected a series A financing round of $ 9.5 million to grow his head count from 14 full -time staff to at least 18, including 4 new engineers.
