Helius

Helius is Solana's leading developer infrastructure platform, providing the RPC nodes, data streaming, transaction delivery, and API tooling that most major Solana applications depend on. Founded in 2022 by Mert Mumtaz and Liam Vovk—both with backgrounds at Coinbase and AWS—the company was built specifically around Solana's architecture rather than adapted from multi-chain infrastructure. Its stated mission is to lower the engineering barrier for building production-grade applications on Solana.

Core Infrastructure

Solana RPC. Helius operates a globally distributed fleet of bare-metal nodes across 11 regions on 3 continents, routed through its proprietary Gatekeeper edge gateway. The gateway directs each request to the nearest healthy node and delivers sub-millisecond response times. The platform reports a 99.99% uptime rate and processes billions of RPC requests each month. Standard JSON-RPC methods are available on all plans, and every tier includes archival data access and enhanced features beyond the Solana standard spec—such as priority fee estimation and the Digital Asset Standard (DAS) API for querying tokens, NFTs, and compressed NFTs without additional infrastructure.

LaserStream. Helius's high-throughput data streaming product is available in both gRPC and WebSocket variants. It delivers blocks, transactions, and account state updates in real time with historical replay capabilities and delivery guarantees. The gRPC version targets latency-sensitive use cases—high-frequency trading, MEV bots, and real-time indexers—and is available on Business plans and above. LaserStream also powers Helius's WebSocket subscriptions across all plan tiers.

Sender. Helius offers a dedicated transaction delivery service designed for reliability during peak network congestion. Sender routes transactions through both Solana validator connections and Jito block engines simultaneously, using seven global endpoints with a default capacity of 50 transactions per second and no API credit cost per use. The product targets teams where failed or delayed transactions carry a direct business cost—market makers, liquidation bots, and latency-sensitive DeFi applications.

Enhanced APIs. Beyond raw RPC, Helius provides a layer of parsed, enriched APIs that reduce the amount of on-chain data processing developers must handle themselves. The Enhanced Transaction API (getTransactionsForAddress) returns fully parsed transaction history for any address, covering over 3,600 Solana programs. The DAS API handles compressed NFT and token queries under the Metaplex Digital Asset Standard. The Priority Fee API estimates optimal transaction fees to reliably land transactions at minimum cost. MEV Protect routes transactions through private channels to minimize frontrunning exposure, while Backrun Rebates allow teams to earn a share of MEV generated by their transaction flow.

Webhooks. Helius delivers real-time HTTP notifications for on-chain events—address activity, token transfers, NFT mints, and program calls—without requiring clients to maintain persistent connections or poll the RPC. This simplifies backend event handling for wallets and consumer applications.

Developer tooling. The platform ships official TypeScript and Rust SDKs. More recently, Helius introduced a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server and CLI designed for integrating Helius capabilities into AI agent workflows.

Pricing and Access

Helius offers a tiered subscription model. The free plan provides 1 million credits per month at 10 requests per second with no payment required—sufficient for prototyping and small-scale projects. Paid plans scale from Developer ($49/month, 10M credits, 50 req/s) through Business ($499/month, 100M credits, 200 req/s) and Professional ($999/month, 200M credits, 500 req/s), to Enterprise tiers with custom pricing for teams requiring more than 1 billion monthly credits and a four-hour support SLA. Staked connections—which materially increase transaction landing rates during network congestion—are included from the Developer plan upward. LaserStream gRPC access is unlocked at the Business tier. All plans include archival data access and protection against overage through configurable auto-scaling limits.

Funding and Backing

Helius raised $9.5 million in a Series A round in early 2024, led by Foundation Capital with participation from Reciprocal Ventures, 6th Man Ventures, Chapter One, and Propel. In September 2024 the company closed a $21.75 million Series B co-led by Haun Ventures and Founders Fund, with follow-on participation from Foundation Capital, Chapter One, and Spearhead. Total disclosed funding stands at approximately $34.35 million. Notable angels include Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko. The company has achieved SOC 2 Type II certification, a compliance milestone relevant to institutional customers building regulated financial applications on Solana.

Ecosystem Role and Customers

Helius is infrastructure-layer software: largely invisible to end users but present throughout most serious Solana applications. Documented customers include Phantom, Jupiter, Backpack, Tensor, Magic Eden, Helium, Crossmint, DFlow, Coinbase, and Bitwise, which selected Helius as a staking provider. The company operates its own Solana validator, and staked connections from that validator are available to API subscribers, giving customers faster transaction inclusion during congestion. Helius also runs a Startup Launchpad program supporting early-stage Solana teams.

ZK Compression and Light Protocol Acquisition

Helius co-developed ZK Compression with Light Protocol, launching the technology in 2024. ZK Compression reduces on-chain state storage costs by up to 1,000x by using zero-knowledge proofs to compress account state, making it practical to store large volumes of data—such as token balances or NFT ownership records—on-chain at a fraction of the usual cost. The technique is now used by teams requiring low-cost mass-scale state storage on Solana.

In June 2026, Helius acquired Light Protocol outright. Light Protocol's engineers had spent four years building Solana-native ZK infrastructure, including the sol_poseidon hash function and altbn128 operations added to Solana's runtime as ZK syscalls. The acquisition returns the Light team to its original mission: building a programmable on-chain privacy layer for Solana. Helius's stated goal is to deliver encrypted balances, private payments, and private DeFi markets with institutional auditability and selective disclosure. The company frames privacy as a prerequisite for traditional financial institutions to operate on Solana's public chain.

Technical Content and Community

Beyond its API products, Helius maintains an active technical blog covering Solana protocol mechanics, validator economics, MEV research, and developer tutorials. Published content spans fundamentals (commitment levels, PDAs, staking), engineering deep-dives (archival layer design, LSM trees), and ecosystem analysis (governance studies, network performance reports). The company positions itself as an educational resource for the Solana developer community alongside its commercial infrastructure role.