Helius

Helius is the infrastructure backbone of the Solana ecosystem. Founded in 2022 and built by a team with deep Solana protocol expertise, Helius operates the network's most widely used developer platform, powering everything from consumer wallets and NFT marketplaces to institutional-grade exchanges, MEV searchers, and DeFi protocols. Clients including Coinbase, Paxos, Jupiter, Backpack, Phantom, Crossmint, Zeta Markets, and Chainalysis run critical workloads on Helius infrastructure.

The company's premise is straightforward: Solana's performance advantages only translate into product advantages when the supporting infrastructure can keep up. Helius was built to close that gap, offering a unified suite of services that handles every layer of interaction with the Solana blockchain — from reading state to landing transactions to streaming real-time data at scale.

Core Infrastructure Products

Solana RPCs form the foundation of the platform. Helius operates globally distributed RPC nodes running through a proprietary edge gateway called Gatekeeper, written in Rust. The result is sub-millisecond response times and a stated 99.99% RPC success rate. Nodes span three continents, with standard JSON-RPC, WebSocket subscriptions, and preconfirmation signals all available.

LaserStream is Helius's flagship high-throughput gRPC streaming product. It enables clients to subscribe to real-time Solana block, transaction, and account data at extreme rates, with the SDK having achieved a 40x throughput increase — from 30 MB/s to over 1.3 GB/s — through recent improvements. LaserStream is aimed at market makers, MEV searchers, and any team that needs to react to on-chain events in milliseconds. Global regional endpoints and redundant node clusters underpin enterprise reliability requirements.

Sender addresses one of Solana's more persistent operational challenges: landing transactions reliably during periods of network congestion. Sender provides seven globally distributed endpoints that route and retry transactions in optimized ways, delivering 5x faster confirmations compared to standard submission paths. This is particularly valuable for traders and DeFi protocols operating in volatile market conditions.

DAS API (Digital Asset Standard) provides parsed, queryable data for Solana's NFT and token ecosystem. Rather than decoding raw on-chain data, clients can query structured endpoints for token metadata, ownership history, and collection-level data. Helius also introduced proprietary RPC methods — getTransfersByAddress and getTransactionsForAddress — that offer up to 10x faster archival queries for parsed transaction history compared to standard approaches.

Webhooks round out the event-driven toolkit, allowing developers to subscribe to on-chain events and receive push notifications rather than polling continuously.

Liquid Staking and Validator Operations

Helius operates one of Solana's largest validators and offers liquid staking through hSOL, its Liquid Staking Token. The validator charges zero commission and returns 100% of SOL issuance rewards and 100% of MEV rewards to stakers, positioning hSOL as one of the highest-yield liquid staking options on the network. Over 14 million SOL is staked with Helius, and the platform serves more than 25,000 hSOL holders and institutional staking clients.

The hSOL token functions as a standard Liquid Staking Token: it accrues staking rewards automatically and can be used across DeFi applications or redeemed without a cooldown period. The product targets individual stakers, DeFi protocols integrating yield-bearing collateral, and institutions requiring auditable, high-yield SOL custody alternatives.

The staking operation has attracted significant institutional partnership activity. Bitwise selected Helius as the exclusive SOL staking provider for its Solana Staking ETF (NYSE: BSOL). The Solana Company chose Helius as its non-custodial staking provider. BitGo now supports both Helius staking and the hSOL token, extending institutional access through a regulated custodian.

Enterprise Positioning and Certification

Helius achieved SOC 2 Type II certification, a standard many institutional clients require before integrating infrastructure providers. The certification covers security, availability, and confidentiality controls, and was a prerequisite for several of the institutional partnerships the company has signed.

The company joined the Solana Developer Platform (SDP), a unified API-first interface that aggregates best-in-class Solana infrastructure. SDP is designed to integrate with AI coding platforms, positioning Helius services within the emerging agentic development workflow. Helius also launched Helius for Agents, an MCP server and Claude Code Plugin offering over 60 tools for Solana development tasks.

Separately, Helius acquired Light Protocol, intending to build what it describes as a canonical privacy layer for Solana. The acquisition extends Helius's infrastructure footprint into the privacy stack — a segment with limited existing infrastructure on Solana.

Pricing and Access Tiers

Helius operates on a credit-based subscription model with five tiers:

• Free: 1M credits/month, 10 requests/sec, community support
• Developer (USD 49/month): 10M credits, 50 requests/sec, staked connections and LaserStream devnet access, chat support
• Business (USD 499/month): 100M credits, 200 requests/sec, full LaserStream WSS and gRPC access, priority support
• Professional (USD 999/month): 200M credits, 500 requests/sec, LaserStream data add-ons, Telegram and Slack support
• Enterprise (custom): 1B+ credits, custom rate limits, 4-hour support SLA

Dedicated Nodes are available from USD 2,900/month for teams requiring fully isolated infrastructure. All paid tiers include Sender's seven-endpoint transaction routing.

Funding and Background

Helius raised USD 21.75M in a round co-led by Haun Ventures and Founders Fund, with participation from Foundation Capital, Chapter One, 6th Man Ventures, and Spearhead. The raise was used to expand the team and accelerate product development across archival data, streaming reliability, and support for new SVM-compatible networks.

The company also joined the Solana Research Institute as a founding member, reflecting its involvement in network-level research alongside commercial infrastructure operations.

Helius publishes technical content through its blog, covering topics from protocol-level analysis to product architecture, contributing to the broader Solana developer knowledge base. The platform has grown to serve clients ranging from individual developers on the free tier to major exchanges and asset managers on enterprise agreements.