1000x · Oct 30, 2026 · 50m · 39m saved
With Illia Polosukhin, Co-Founder of NEAR Protocol
Photo via artificial-intelligence.blog
Buying a single CryptoKitty in 2019 took 92 steps and about 12 hours, and that finding turned NEAR from blockchain infrastructure toward consumer products. Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of NEAR Protocol and a co-author of the transformer paper at Google, told 1000x that crypto's main failure was onboarding, not technology.
Most AI-and-crypto pitches start from the token. Illia's starts from a practical problem: his first AI startup could not pay its data labelers abroad, so he built a blockchain to do it.
"The transaction fees at the time were higher than what we were paying people... we're going to go build the blockchain quickly. It's going to be 6 months, right? It's pretty easy. And then we can come back to AI." — Illia Polosukhin
It took a little over two years. Illia now runs a network moving about $4 billion a month and argues that AI agents will need blockchains to pay each other and to prove which model they ran.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 50 minutes of audio, 11 minutes of reading.
Here are the 12 takeaways that matter.
Key Takeaways
Illia's case for decentralized money began with Soviet savings that became worthless and bread prices that rose about 100x in a year
NEAR exists because PayPal, Wise and bank transfers could not pay students in China and Eastern Europe
A blockchain pitched as a six-month project launched in October 2020, a little over two years later
Buying one CryptoKitty took 92 steps and 12 hours, which pushed NEAR toward chain abstraction
NEAR handles about $4B a month in volume, with near.com 10-20% of it, and uses its fees to buy back NEAR tokens
AI agents calling an opaque API cannot know which model answered, which Illia says blockchain verification fixes
NEAR recovered 100% of $3.8M drained from a partner bridge after its monitoring system flagged the exploit
1. Hyperinflation Shaped NEAR
Illia traces his views on money to post-Soviet Ukraine. His grandparents kept their savings at Sberbank, the main Soviet savings bank.
Illia watched his grandparents' savings disappear with the USSR
"They had this savings book from Sberbank, which was USSR kind of main savings bank... they had some savings there that effectively when USSR disappeared was not worth the paper this was printed on." — Illia Polosukhin
Hyperinflation followed. Illia remembers bread prices rising about 100-fold in a year, and he says those years, along with reading Asimov and Heinlein and watching the film "Artificial Intelligence" at about 10, convinced him early that the world needed both decentralized money and AI. At 14 he was entering programming competitions.
Illia decided as a teenager that a machine should write code
"I really believed for like since I was 14 that we're just going to automate coding with AI effectively." — Illia Polosukhin
In college he studied applied math and worked remotely for a San Diego machine-learning firm on decision-tree credit scoring and insurance risk models, including one project hunting for oil in drilling data.
