Inside NEAR: 10+ Years Building Toward the Agent Economy with Illia Polosukhin
Exploring how NEAR Is AI Money
From pioneering the Transformer architecture now used in every AI stack to building the rails for the agent economy, NEAR Co-Founder Illia Polosukhin connects the full arc in this inaugural episode of “Inside NEAR,” a new quarterly series on The Rollup. Illia breaks down NEAR’s early architectural bets that are now paying off, why privacy had to be a base-layer choice, and how it all culminates in NEAR becoming AI money: the unit of account for inference, compute, and every agent-to-agent transaction settling onchain. With $20B+ in Intents volume and a path to deflation, the thesis is simple: NEAR’s TAM isn't crypto, it's all of commerce.
Illia Polosukhin is Co-Founder of NEAR Protocol.
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