In this episode of Latest Development, Dirt sits down with Nick Pennie, co-founder of Helius, to break down their newest release: LaserStream—a game-changing streaming infrastructure for Solana.

LaserStream solves one of the most frustrating problems for developers: how to reliably stream account and transaction state in real time—without disconnects, missed blocks, or manual recovery. Nick explains how it works, why it matters, and how Helius is setting the bar for developer tooling in the Solana ecosystem.

⏱ Timestamps:

00:50 – What is Helius?

02:30 – RPCs, data access & global node optimization

04:45 – Developer tooling beyond RPC: APIs, indexers, & token data

06:10 – Streaming data on Solana: limitations of WebSockets

07:42 – What is LaserStream? 09:20 – Account state replay: why it’s critical and how LaserStream handles it

11:00 – How LaserStream improves latency and reliability

13:45 – Difference between LaserStream and Fumarole

18:35 – Who is LaserStream for? All teams, not just traders

19:23 – Potential new use cases: simulation, trading bots, micro replays

21:02 – Building the shovel store during the Solana gold rush

21:49 – What’s next for Helius: Historical data querying, optimized transaction sending