E179: Helius CEO: These 3 Crypto Coins Are MASSIVELY Underpriced (2026 Cycle)

Mert Mumtaz, CEO of Helius, which he describes as the largest RPC and trading infrastructure platform on Solana, identifies three assets he considers massively underpriced heading into the 2026 cycle: Solana, Zcash, and NEAR. He entered Solana around $8 and Zcash around $18, and holds NEAR as a lower-conviction speculative position he does not currently own. His investment framework centers on three tests: whether a project has the right physics and incentives, whether it is distressed and slept-on, and whether it offers asymmetric upside.

Mumtaz argues Solana is underappreciated because Crypto Twitter is dominated by traders rather than ecosystem participants, making CT sentiment a lagging indicator while developer counts and startup pitch volume are leading indicators. He frames Solana as a global Silicon Valley where anyone with internet access can build a business on-chain on pure meritocracy, citing Axiom, Pump.fun, Magic Eden, Phantom, and Jupiter as evidence that Solana has the highest per-capita concentration of significant companies in crypto relative to its market cap. He contrasts Solana's incentive structure, where wallets, DEXes, and the Foundation all benefit from each other's success, with Ethereum's L2 approach, where L1 loses value capture to L2s while L2s do not benefit from each other's success.

A valid criticism Mumtaz acknowledges is that the SOL token's primary stated purpose is spam prevention and resource rationing, which is not a compelling investment narrative, and Anatoly Yakovenko has publicly said he does not care about the token price. To counter this, Mumtaz argues block space is not a commodity because liquidity and state are sticky and cannot be replicated on competing chains, and that institutional trading firms such as Citadel and Jane Street would need to hold SOL to compete for block space priority on time-sensitive trades. Helius is pushing a proposal to cut Solana's inflation rate by half in half the originally scheduled time, and a fee burn mechanism proportional to compute usage is also under consideration. Solana just hit an all-time high in transaction activity at the time of recording, with block times at 400 milliseconds and being cut in half. Mumtaz flags a potential AI bubble pop heading into Q4 or early next year as a macro risk that could create risk-off conditions regardless of Solana fundamentals.

Mumtaz's Zcash thesis is his most developed. He entered at $18, and the asset subsequently ran to approximately $600 before declining. His current price target uses 10 percent of Bitcoin's market cap as a conservative first stop, which at Bitcoin's roughly $1.5 trillion market cap implies a Zcash market cap near $150 billion and a price around $4,000, representing roughly a 10x from levels discussed. He argues Zcash has a simple investment meme as private money, analogous to Bitcoin as digital gold, and uses the Canadian truckers example to illustrate how transparent transaction history makes assets non-fungible and subject to surveillance or effective freezing. Zcash allows transparent transactions for users who prefer them while also offering the option to shield funds.

On the Zcash security incident, Mumtaz and Tushar from Multicoin Capital both describe it as a non-event. The bug allowed minting of shielded notes inside the orchard pool, but a turnstile mechanism prevents anything from exiting the pool beyond what entered it, capping potential damage. Mumtaz expresses 99 percent confidence the bug was not exploited, citing stable price behavior and continued growth of the shielded pool during the relevant period. The bug was found proactively during a deliberate audit rather than discovered randomly. An upcoming upgrade called Ironwood will migrate orchard pool funds and confirm whether the turnstile was triggered. The orchard pool and Ironwood have since been formally verified using Mithos and a recent GPT model, providing mathematical proof that the same class of bugs cannot recur.

Mumtaz's NEAR thesis is less developed by his own admission and his conviction is lower than on Solana and Zcash. He highlights NEAR's sharding architecture as representing Ethereum's original abandoned vision, and notes that NEAR co-founder Ilya, one of the authors of the foundational large language model paper, was identifying agentic AI use cases as early as 2024. He describes NEAR as undervalued relative to assets ranked above it in market cap with upside he considers significantly more than a 2x, but flags that success depends on resolving sharding and other outstanding technical issues. Helius is not currently building on NEAR.

On Hyperliquid, Mumtaz argues it is better understood as a much-improved Binance than as a successful blockchain, noting that Hyper Core itself does not do much and the real product is the exchange. He says Solana does not compete with Hyperliquid directly and that Solana's role is to enable builders on top of it to compete with Hyperliquid. He notes that bugs in Solana have been ironed out to the point where a team can now attempt to build a competitive risk engine, whereas a year ago the chain was not reliable enough to do so without shortcuts. Slightly less than 20 percent of traders on Calci believed SOL would trade above $150 by year end at the time of recording.