Helius.dev CEO Mert Mumtaz Highlights "Insanely Inefficient" Nature of Fully On-Chain Private Messenger on Solana

Mert Mumtaz, CEO of Solana developer tools firm Helius.dev, recently revealed via social media that he prototyped a private messenger application on the Solana blockchain, albeit describing the endeavor as "insanely inefficient." The revelation, made in a tweet, came amidst what he characterized as growing "doubts about Signal" and was partly motivated by a personal stance against Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

While Solana is celebrated for its high transaction throughput, capable of processing up to 65,000 transactions per second with average fees as low as $0.00025, building a private messenger directly on its public ledger presents unique challenges. Storing the vast amounts of encrypted message content directly on-chain can lead to significant storage costs and retrieval complexities, even with Solana's speed, making a fully on-chain approach less practical for a typical messaging application.

Several projects, such as Secretum and Sol Chat, have already launched as decentralized, encrypted messaging apps on Solana. These platforms typically mitigate the inefficiency of full on-chain storage by utilizing hybrid architectures, often storing message content off-chain (e.g., via IPFS) while maintaining metadata or cryptographic proofs on the Solana blockchain. Helius.dev itself is actively involved in developing privacy-enhancing solutions for Solana, including projects like Arcium, a private compute network, and Light Protocol, which enables private SOL transactions using a UTXO model, addressing some of these inherent inefficiencies.

The context of "doubts about Signal" in Mumtaz's tweet points to a broader desire for more decentralized and privacy-centric communication solutions. While Signal is renowned for its end-to-end encryption, its reliance on centralized servers for certain functionalities, such as metadata handling, is a point of concern for some privacy advocates. Mumtaz's "FU to Trudeau" comment further illustrates a personal, politically charged motivation for exploring alternatives that offer greater autonomy and censorship resistance.

As a prominent figure in the Solana ecosystem and leader of Helius.dev, which aims to make building on Solana "better, cheaper, and faster," Mumtaz's prototype serves as a practical exploration of Solana's capabilities and limitations for complex applications like private messaging. His candid assessment underscores that while technically feasible, optimizing such applications for true efficiency and privacy requires innovative architectural designs and ongoing advancements in blockchain technology.