IP
Illia Polosukhin is a Ukrainian-born computer scientist and the co-founder of NEAR Protocol.
He grew up in Kharkiv and earned a master's degree in applied mathematics and computer science at the National Technical University Kharkiv Polytechnic Institute before moving to California. After about six years as a software developer at Salford Systems, he joined Google Research in 2014, where he became an engineering manager and co-authored the 2017 paper Attention Is All You Need, which introduced the transformer architecture behind modern large language models.
He left Google in 2017 to start NEAR.ai with Alexander Skidanov, an AI program synthesis startup that pivoted into the NEAR blockchain, whose mainnet launched in 2020. In November 2023 he became CEO of the NEAR Foundation, succeeding Marieke Flament.
He also leads NEAR AI, which works on what he calls user-owned AI, and in 2022 helped create the Unchain Fund for civilian relief in Ukraine. His recent public focus is on AI agents as users of blockchains, confidential computing and NEAR Intents.
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Latest interview · Oct 1, 2026Illia Polosukhin on NEAR's privacy features and AI agents in 2026Watch the episode →
Key points
- NEAR has implemented privacy by default for trading and confidential perpetuals, addressing concerns about exposing financial strategies to competitors and malicious actors.
- NEAR Intents aggregates liquidity across multiple blockchains and traditional exchanges, enabling large tokenized stock purchases like $10M Nvidia shares without excessive slippage.
- The Shield system prevents stolen funds from moving through NEAR Intents by intelligently evaluating incoming assets and flagging high-risk transactions to the network.
- NEAR's privacy model is practical rather than sovereign, allowing government requests to decrypt information through multi-party infrastructure while protecting ordinary users from constant surveillance.
- Early Confidential Intents users received a free token distribution to encourage actual usage of privacy features rather than passive token holding.
In their own words
“This is not sovereign-level privacy like Zcash. It's pragmatic privacy, so that every transaction doesn't get telegraphed to everyone.”
“Right now we're literally in a DOS stage of agents.”
“It shows how powerful it is to reuse existing code.”
“Our global vision is that AI is going to be the front end and blockchain is the back end.”
Every appearance on Crypto Coin Show
Latest episode shown above.
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