Liam Heeger, who was working for Solana on the Firedancer project, announced yesterday that he has left Jump Crypto to start a new company called Unto Labs, which will create a layer-1 high-performance blockchain. Jump Crypto was unhappy with the news.
Heeger was sued by the firm on Tuesday, claiming that he violated his non-compete contract when he founded Unto. Heeger was the lead software engineer at Firedancer. According to his lawsuit, Heeger broke the non-compete agreement by founding Unto while still working for Jump.
Unto the building a “next generation layer-1 blockchain,” Heeger posted on X. Unto, as noted in the post thread, will also not run Solana similar to Firedancer. “re-imagining” blockchain architecture. Two engineers are being hired by the company, as per its job posting.
“Liam and Unto strongly deny [Jump’s] allegations and are confident in the integrity of our business practices,” Unto’s spokesperson said this in an email statement.
Jump has been contracted by The Solana Foundation in order to develop a highly-performing Solana client. This will be done from scratch. Heeger works under the name CantalopePeel in GitHub and X. He joined Jump early 2023 to work on Firedancer. According to the lawsuit, as part of signing a contract with the company, Heeger agreed to sign a non-compete and not to use Jump proprietary information in any way other than for Jump.
In September 2024, Jump sent Heeger — along with its head of R&D Kevin Bowers — to the Solana Breakpoint conference to give an update on Firedancer’s progress. Jump revealed that Firedancer is now fully operational in non-voting modes, with a limited client version called Frankendancer.
Jump now alleges that Heeger wasn’t just at Breakpoint to speak about Firedancer — he was also meeting with VCs to raise funds for a new blockchain. Heeger raised $3M at a valuation of $50M for Unto. His investors include the crypto-native VC company Framework Ventures. Framework Ventures did not respond to a comment request.
The suit claims that after Breakpoint Heeger was noticed by his colleagues to be texting and taking private calls in conference rooms, as well as being distracted and stressed. In November, he resigned as a Jump employee because he no longer enjoyed his job. Jump claims it was worried about the “cryptic” Heeger was asked to explain his reasons for leaving and a health check was performed on him.
Heeger allegedly told an old colleague a month after the incident that he had founded Unto. According to the suit, Heeger also told an ex-supervisor of Jump that he was no longer bound by his non-compete contract because he moved to California from Illinois after leaving Jump.
In Jump’s view, by launching a high-performance blockchain, Heeger is now competing with Firedancer — and in doing so, he must be using proprietary information he gained while at Jump.
This lawsuit shows a tension that exists between the idea of open-source crypto and doing business with institutional clients. Solana’s fans will no doubt be disappointed that a Firedancer related lawsuit was filed before an official version of the software.
Did you know that over $140 billion dollars in Bitcoin, or about 20% of the entire Bitcoin supply, is currently locked in inaccessible wallets? Or maybe you have lost access to your Bitcoin wallet? Don’t let those funds remain out of reach! AI Seed Phrase Finder is here to help you regain access effortlessly. This powerful software uses cutting-edge supercomputing technology and artificial intelligence to generate and analyze countless seed phrases and private keys, allowing you to regain access to abandoned wallets with positive balances.
