Why Crypto Needs Privacy: Mert Mumtaz on Zcash, Building on Solana, and Long-Horizon Investing

In this episode of When Shift Happens, I sit down with Mert Mumtaz, CEO and co-founder of Helius, to discuss why he’s betting hard on privacy, Solana infrastructure, and long-term conviction plays like Zcash, SOL, Bitcoin, and Hyperliquid. The conversation goes deep on first-principles investing, how internet connectivity reshapes price action, and the discipline it takes to build and capture value over a 3–5 year horizon.

Mert’s worldview starts with time. “Every investment I make is going to be at least a three to five-year time horizon,” he says. That means even brutal price swings don’t change the thesis unless reality changes. That means ignoring the noise and questioning fundamentals like technology, community, history, existential risks, and a reasoned sense of fair value. 

If something is still undervalued on first principles, he keeps allocating. It’s an approach that sounds unfashionable in a market hooked on 10x screenshots, but it’s how he’s chosen to operate as both builder and investor.

Why Privacy—and Why Zcash

The heart of Mert’s conviction is privacy. Moving finance from the analogue world to the internet without privacy, he argues, creates a dystopian rail where every transaction is surveilled and sensitive data can be weaponised. He traces this conviction through the cypherpunk lineage—Satoshi, Hal Finney, Andreas—who all wished for stronger privacy at the base layer. 

“ZK-based privacy is an unsolved problem, but it has to work,” he says. That led him down the Zcash rabbit holedespite it ’s not-spotless history. Simply because it is a live, battle-tested implementation of zero-knowledge proofs and “Bitcoin but private” tokenomics, featuring the proof-of-work, fair emission, and store-of-value intent.

Mert’s explanation of Zcash for a non-technical listener is clear: “Imagine cash in your pocket, but on the internet, and secret. I don’t know how much you have, you don’t know how much I have, but we can pay each other and store value. That’s it.”

For him, privacy is not about hiding wrongdoing; it’s about choice, dignity, and functional capitalism. If all activity is permanently public, you invite price discrimination, politicised finance, and chilling effects on lawful speech, which is exactly the opposite of open, resilient markets.

Connectivity, Reflexivity, and ICM

Mert’s favourite mental model is borrowed from Mathematician Nassim Taleb: connectivity and reflexivity. The internet connects information at near-zero friction, so the dominating factor in a connected system is speed. Falsehoods propagate faster than corrections, and attention spreads faster than verification (Brandolini’s law). Crypto turns that information flow directly into capital flows. “If I see a coin on Twitter, I can press one button and direct funds to it. If everyone does it, that’s reflexivity. Price goes up because it’s going up, and it goes down just as fast.” In this framing, memes, perps, and prediction markets are simply different ways of pricing attention.

Rather than complaining about volatility, Mert treats it as the native physics of internet markets. His builder’s response is to help the best infrastructure win. That’s where Solana and Helius come in: the ambition is an “internet of capital markets”, with over 10,000 composable markets in your pocket, tradable by anyone, anywhere. He doesn’t think one actor will capture everything, but industries will tend towards a few dominant winners. He’s betting Solana will be one of them.

Hyperliquid and Building for the Second Winner

On exchanges and the perps landscape, Mert’s thesis leaves room for a strong number two. He’s become more constructive on Hyperliquid after initially doubting whether product quality could persist as it decentralises. 

Now that he’s noticed organic teams building around it, it is reminiscent of early Solana energy. Does it need to be maximally decentralised to be legitimate? Perhaps not, as long as the user experience and ecosystem pull remain strong. The point isn’t ideology, but execution, user pull, and whether the network can mature alongside its community.

Value Created vs Value Captured

One of the most revealing threads in the conversation is Mert’s personal evolution from pure builder to builder who insists on capturing fair value. The nudge came from his relationship, but the lesson is broadly applicable to founders and open-source contributors. 

You can love the game and still structure deals, products, and partnerships to capture a share of the value you create. “We created all this value, why aren’t we capturing it?” he asks. That shift doesn’t mean flipping into short-termism but rather protecting your mission from exploitation so you can sustain it over a long horizon.

Integrity, Brand, and Sleeping at Night

Mert’s brand is powerful enough to move prices (rightly or wrongly) and it rests on a single constraint: sleep at night. “If I’ve done something that compromises my integrity, I can’t sleep,” he admits. The operating rule is maximal truth-seeking, even when it’s uncomfortable. 

Also, he admits authenticity isn’t an excuse to be dull on the internet. If you’re boring, no one cares. He aims to be direct, occasionally provocative, but grounded—criticising what deserves critique while shipping real products with a real team. That combination, he believes, helped alter Solana’s trajectory and is now catalysing a broader privacy renaissance across ecosystems.

The Long View

For Mert Mumtaz, the future of crypto isn’t about chasing the next rally but building systems that can outlast them. His philosophy ties conviction to time, privacy to freedom, and integrity to brand survival. 

The lesson is simple but hard to live by: real builders think in years, not weeks. If crypto is to move beyond speculation, it must protect privacy, capture genuine value, and keep its moral compass intact. Mert’s call to founders and investors alike is to stop reacting to noise and start creating the rails that will make the internet’s next economy both open and enduring.

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