A public company that pays on a public blockchain can end up disclosing information before its earnings call, Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of NEAR Protocol, told The Rollup.
Most of crypto was built on full transparency, and Zcash built its following on privacy for individuals. Illia said businesses are the next buyers of privacy, and that the same problem now extends to the data people hand to AI assistants.
"The blockchain was supposed to be private. The Satoshi just didn't have technology to do it. And now there is technology, so let's actually achieve that."
Illia co-founded the chain whose NEAR AI unit now runs open-weight models inside encrypted, verifiable enclaves. Two colleagues joined him: Alex from the near.com team and Anton from NEAR's protocol engineering side.
The full episode is covered here so you can skip it. 55 minutes of audio, 9 minutes of reading.
Here are the 9 arguments that matter.
The Rollup · Oct 24, 2026 · 55m · 46m saved
With Illia Polosukhin, Co-Founder of NEAR Protocol · Alex, near.com Team at NEAR · Anton, Protocol Engineer at NEAR
Key Takeaways
Public blockchains expose every payment, which becomes a disclosure risk for a listed company ahead of earnings
Confidential intents and TEEs bring on-chain privacy level with what modern banks offer, Alex said
Alex wants user-owned AI to be free, paid for by NEAR Intents transaction revenue rather than subscriptions
Subscriptions reward a provider for maximizing engagement, in his view
NEAR's multi-cryptography accounts let it add post-quantum signing without the all-or-nothing migration Bitcoin faces
NEAR has already shipped ML-DSA-65
NEAR AI returns signed hashes of each prompt, each response and the exact hardware that ran it
Illia's rough estimate puts 50% of an item's cost in legal and procurement work that verifiability could reduce
AI agents will hold NEAR tokens as a deposit that can be slashed for bad behavior, Illia said
1. Public Ledgers Leak Data
Illia said crypto has moved past a decade of speculation, and real businesses now want to use it. The obstacle is that a public blockchain shows every transaction and payment to anyone who looks.
Public companies paying on-chain face a disclosure problem, not only a competitive one
"If you're a public company, this becomes like actual like regulatory concerns as well, right? That you're effectively disclosing information you're not supposed to before earnings calls." — Illia Polosukhin
The risk Illia described is regulatory: payments visible on-chain can reveal results before a company reports them. He added a personal angle. AI is getting better at correlating spending data across wallet addresses, so an individual's purchases are easier to tie together than they used to be.
