Among the numerous competitors in the Ethereum ecosystem, Solana has always been considered a top contender. With its high performance, low gas fees, and various other advantages, Solana has garnered increasing developer support in recent years. Solana shows immense growth potential regarding on-chain capital inflow or ecosystem development. However, it still faces several challenges, including network stability issues, high entry barriers for developers, and poor cross-chain interoperability—issues that heavily hinder its ecosystem‘s further growth.

To improve the Solana experience and help developers simplify application development, Helius offers various tools, including APIs, RPC nodes, Webhooks, and the innovative ZK Compression solution. This article will explore the Helius project, delving into its team background, core products, innovative architecture, and prospects to offer valuable insights to users.

What is Helius?

Helius is an infrastructure provider dedicated to the Solana ecosystem. It is dedicated to offering developers a suite of tools, including APIs, RPC nodes, Webhooks, and other resources, to help developers build, deploy, and manage applications with greater efficiency and lower costs, thereby contributing to the prosperity and stability of the Solana ecosystem.

Source: Helius

So far, Helius has supported over 1,000 companies worldwide, spanning areas such as wallets, public chains, NFTs, DeFi, and gaming, with notable clients including Backpack, Phantom, Crossmint, ZETA, Shopify, and Sling. On the platform, users can choose from different pricing tiers based on their needs.

Currently, Helius has not launched a token, and users can access and use the platform’s services via credits.

Team Background and Funding

Founded in 2022, Helius operates with a distributed team across seven global cities, including San Francisco, Singapore, Dubai, and Tokyo.

The company was co-founded by three individuals: Mert Mumtazn, CEO, who previously worked as a software engineer at Coinbase; Liam Vovk, CTO, who previously worked at Amazon; and Nicolas Pennie, COO, who formerly held a position at Accenture.

Data from Rootdata shows that over the past two to three years, Helius has raised a total of $34.35 million across three funding rounds.

• In October 2022, Helius secured a $3.1 million seed round, led by Reciprocal Ventures and Chapter One, with participation from Solana Ventures, Alchemy Ventures, Big Brain Holdings, and others.
• In February 2024, Helius raised $9.5 million in Series A funding, led by Foundation Capital, with participation from 6th Man Ventures, Reciprocal Ventures, Chapter One, Propel VC, and others.
• In September 2024, Helius completed a $21.75 million Series B funding round, led by Haun Ventures and Founders Fund, with participation from 6th Man Ventures, Foundation Capital, Chapter One, and other investors.

Helius‘ Core Products and Technology

Focusing exclusively on the Solana ecosystem, Helius always keeps developers at the heart of its product development. To streamline the development process on Solana and enhance both developer efficiency and user experience, Helius currently offers three main categories of products and services:

1) Infrastructure

• RPC Nodes

Helius aims to provide developers with the fastest and lowest-latency RPC nodes. According to the team, its response speed is more than 200 times faster than competing solutions, with a success rate of 99.99% and over 1.5 billion successful RPC calls daily. Helius offers two types of RPC nodes to cater to different developer use cases: shared and dedicated, with variations in speed between the two.

Helius’s RPC nodes are powered by top-tier hardware and are distributed globally across locations such as New York, Vancouver, Singapore, Frankfurt, and the UK. They ensure the best possible experience.

• Validators

Solana uses a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) mechanism, where validators maintain network security and decentralization. The latest data shows that Solana has 1,416 validators, with Helius being the largest, staking over 12.85 million SOL. Other notable validators include Galaxy, Binance Staking, and Coinbase.

Source: solanabeach.io

Users who hold SOL can also enjoy Helius’ staking services. Unlike other enterprise validators like Coinbase, Figment, and Galaxy, which charge a 5%–8% commission, Helius does not charge fees and gives 100% of the MEV rewards to stakers. Helius also provides the highest APY on Solana, which ranges between 8%–11%.

2) Data Services

To ensure real-time, continuous data access, especially for large files or applications requiring live interaction, Helius has developed various methods for streaming data to databases. These include:

• Webhook

Webhook is a lightweight, real-time communication mechanism, providing real-time event notifications on the Solana blockchain, such as new transaction confirmations, address balance changes, and NFT mints. Users can configure these notifications to suit their needs. Currently, Helius’s Webhooks integrate with Discord and support over 70 types of transactions. A single Webhook can handle up to 100,000 addresses, and users can easily manage them via the panel, API, or SDK.

• WebSocket

WebSocket allows persistent, two-way communication between clients and servers, which makes it ideal for applications that require instant updates, such as chat apps, online games, and markets. However, it’s important to note that WebSocket connections can sometimes be unstable and may disconnect unexpectedly.

• Geyser (gRPC)

Compared to WebSocket, Geyser is more stable and reliable. It can offer the fastest transmission speeds and is particularly suited for high-frequency trading, sniping, and other time-sensitive use cases. Helius’s Geyser plugin is customizable, which allows users to subscribe to specific blocks, slots, transactions, and accounts.

Source: helius.dev

3) Assets and Transaction Data

• NFT/Token/Transaction API

With the NFT API, developers can easily access metadata and complete activity history for any NFT on Solana. Through the Token API, developers can instantly retrieve all transactions associated with any token, as well as wallet account information. The Transaction API provides users with fee prioritization suggestions based on network demand, ensuring transactions are completed promptly and accurately.

• ZK Compression & Photon API

Solana is well-known for its low transaction costs, but in reality, its on-chain state, particularly on-chain storage, can be expensive. As the Solana ecosystem grows, managing the increasing state is becoming a significant challenge. To address these issues, Helius, in collaboration with the Light Protocol team, has introduced the ZK Compression solution. The core idea behind this innovation is to compress the state. This reduces the amount of data stored on-chain and significantly lowers the costs while maintaining data security, integrity, and verifiability.

For example, creating a typical Program Derived Address (PDA) account usually costs around 0.0016 SOL. However, with ZK Compression, the cost of a compressed account drops to just 0.00001 SOL. This dramatic reduction in costs facilitates the large-scale adoption of applications.

In essence, ZK Compression allows developers to compress all states and store them in the Solana ledger as a Merkle Tree. Only the tree’s root, a small fingerprint of all compressed accounts, is stored on-chain. To parse or retrieve compressed account data, users can use Helius’s indexer, Photon, which provides a one-click CLI (Command-Line Interface) tool that integrates seamlessly with local setups and includes an intuitive resource manager. Currently, the Photon solution is open-source. Moreover, to simplify the developer experience, Helius has also released a Photon API similar to Solana’s native API.

Another key feature of ZK Compression is its composability. Any Solana account can be compressed and decompressed at any time, with the two forms easily convertible. This feature is not limited to a single application, business logic, or account.

Based on the same underlying principles, Helius also launched the NFT Compression service, which allows developers and creators to mint large volumes of NFTs at an extremely low cost.

Helius has not yet issued a token but offers a points-based system. The platform provides different pricing plans tailored to teams of varying sizes. These plans supports both fiat and cryptocurrency payments. The service packages include credits, API Keys, Webhooks, and customer support, with credits used to access and utilize the platform’s products and services.

Source: Helius.dev

Ecosystem Development and Support Resources

In addition to the core products mentioned above, Helius has also launched a series of tools to enhance the developer experience, such as the token airdrop assistant Airship, RPC testnet, and SDKs for Node.js and Rust.

Airship is built on ZK Compression and is now open-source. Users can access it via both a browser interface and CLI, with the latter being more suited for large-scale airdrops.

Source: airship.helius.dev

Airship helps users save significantly on airdrop costs while being extremely user-friendly. To use it, users only need a Solana wallet, SOL for transaction fees, a list of recipient addresses, and an RPC supporting ZK Compression and DAS (Digital Asset Standard) APIs. Before starting, users can also estimate token airdrop costs via the airdrop calculator.

At the same time, to promote the growth of the Solana ecosystem, Helius has launched a Launchpad to provide comprehensive support for high-quality startups, covering technical, financial, strategic, and partnership needs. It’s important to note that the Helius support program is aimed at projects that have not yet completed Series A or later funding rounds.

Outlook and Challenges

Helius has consistently demonstrated a strong commitment to the growth of the Solana ecosystem. Since its inception, the team has continuously enhanced its products and services while keeping a close eye on the Solana blockchain’s evolution. Moreover, it collaborates with ecosystem partners to optimize network performance and address any shortcomings.

At the end of last year, Helius founder Mert Mumtaz stated that the team had been developing a new performance optimization system (BTS) for Solana. The system has shown promise on the testnet and is expected to increase Solana’s TPS by 1,000 times, without making any core architectural changes.

This strong commitment to the Solana ecosystem demonstrates Helius’s focus and boldness. However, it also introduces certain risks. Helius must continue to adapt to the development and changes of Solana and collaborate deeply with ecosystem partners to address uncertainties. Additionally, while the ZK Compression solution offers new possibilities for state growth and data storage, it still requires further real-world testing to improve and gain wider adoption. Currently, Helius has begun establishing its business model, but regardless of whether the platform issues a token in the future, it needs to make the business model sustainable. This requires consistently releasing high-quality products and services to maintain developer interest, as well as ongoing developer education.

Conclusion

As a leading infrastructure provider within the Solana ecosystem, Helius is committed to simplifying the Solana development process, thus allowing developers to focus on building applications rather than dealing with underlying technical complexities. By offering a comprehensive suite of tools and services, along with its innovative ZK Compression solution, Helius has the potential to become a key force driving the continuous growth and innovation of the Solana ecosystem.

However, Helius must continue to update and expand its services to stay competitive while actively collaborating with ecosystem partners to promote the widespread adoption of Solana technologies and applications. This will help foster the diversity and vitality of the entire ecosystem.