NEAR Protocol (NEAR) pushed higher through Friday morning, gaining more than 11% over the past 24 hours to trade above $5.20 as of 07:18 UTC.

The rally put the spotlight on a governance change announced two days earlier. On October 14, the NEAR Foundation announced that Helius CEO Mert Mumtaz had joined the Foundation's council.

NEAR Protocol is an open-source, proof-of-stake, layer-one blockchain, and the NEAR Foundation is the organization that supports the growth and development of the NEAR ecosystem. Council appointments of this kind place an outside executive within the governance layer of the organization backing a network, which is why changes to a foundation's council are typically watched closely by ecosystem participants.

Mumtaz is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Helius, a company that provides infrastructure and developer tooling within the Solana ecosystem, making his addition to the NEAR Foundation council an appointment that spans two major blockchain ecosystems. The relevance for NEAR readers is that infrastructure and tooling providers sit closest to the point where developers build, deploy, and run applications, giving Mumtaz a ground-level view of how one major layer-one ecosystem serves its developer base — a perspective now attached to the governance of another.

As of the announcement, the Foundation's October 14 statement is the public detail covered here on Mumtaz's appointment; any further outline of the council's agenda or his specific responsibilities would come through the NEAR Foundation's official channels, giving readers a concrete thread to follow as the story develops.

This content was first published on COINOTAG: https://en.coinotag.com/near-jumps-11-percent-helius-ceo-mumtaz-joins-foundation-council