Milk Road · Nov 6, 2026 · 55m · 47m saved
With Illia Polosukhin, Co-Founder of NEAR Protocol and CEO of NEAR AI
Illia Polosukhin, a co-author of the "Attention Is All You Need" paper that introduced the Transformer architecture behind modern AI, told Milk Road's John that he started warning of a "security Armageddon" after watching an AI model find a networking vulnerability that was nowhere in its training data. His answer is a stack that pairs AI agents with blockchain: agents that can trade, pay and now help secure software, built on a network he calls a "market of markets."
"The way I describe it is it's a vertically integrated stack for the future of AI and blockchain... everyone will have their personal or corporate agent that represents them." — Illia Polosukhin
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 55 minutes of audio, 8 minutes of reading.
Here are the 7 calls that matter.
Key Takeaways
AI agents can fix markets that run on guesswork, not data, Illia argues
NEAR went "confidential by default" in October, hiding balances and trades unless a user discloses them
Tireless AI will out-pace human bug-fixing, so NEAR built "uncensored" models just for defensive security work
A theorem-proving harness cut formal-verification costs roughly 200x, NEAR says
NEAR's Shield system paused a live exploit and clawed back stolen funds, after an October hack
NEAR Intents can't be fully permissionless, because it has to reconcile non-final blockchains
NEAR holders voted to cut annual token issuance from 2.5% to 1.6% over two years
1. Bad Data Makes Bad Markets
Illia's starting claim is that ordinary commerce runs on bad information, and that AI agents can close the gap. He points to San Francisco grocery stores, which he says overstock food by 50-100% because they have no real-time read on demand.
Illia says AI agents can make a $20T economy of guesswork efficient
"The stores in San Francisco stock up on food 50 to 100% more than actually gets bought... because there's no efficient information about how much purchasing will happen." — Illia Polosukhin
On near.com, that thesis is already live: users can swap Tesla stock or pre-IPO names for crypto, trade perpetuals, or route a payment to a European bank account, with execution against Nasdaq liquidity behind the scenes.
"Near.com already is effectively an exchange of exchanges — you can go from Tesla to Bitcoin to Zcash to someone's IBAN on a bank account in Europe." — Illia Polosukhin
He says the same model now reaches past financial assets into services and physical goods. Blockchain strips out the legal, banking and interchange costs layered across the roughly $20 trillion commercial economy — costs humans struggle to navigate, but an AI agent can route around them by turning plain language into on-chain commands.
