The Story Behind NEAR and Its Co-Founder Illia Polosukhin

• Illia Polosukhin co-founded NEAR to fix blockchain’s usability and scalability from the ground up.
• He believes AI must stay decentralized, ethical, and user-controlled, not monopolized by big tech.

While most people are busy talking about crypto prices going up and down like a drunken rollercoaster, Illia Polosukhin has chosen a deeper and perhaps a little quieter path: infrastructure. Instead of just joining in making tokens, he’s building a foundation. And that foundation is called NEAR Protocol.

But let’s back up a bit. Long before he sat as the co-founder of one of the most developer-friendly Layer-1 blockchains today, Illia was a kid from Ukraine living in a time of economic turmoil. Amid the dizzying inflation of adults, he was already busy with one thing that never changed: computer logic.

At the age of 10, he was already making his own games. If at that time you were still learning to play snake on a black and white cellphone, he was making his own games from scratch.

It’s no wonder that he then landed at Google and became part of the team that helped develop Transformers—yes, the forerunner of GPT, BERT, and the like. But interestingly, instead of being comfortable in Google’s soft chair while drinking coffee every afternoon, Illia chose to go out and build something that might not necessarily work.

From Frustration to Foundation: How NEAR Took Shape

After leaving Google in 2017, Illia and his colleague Alexander Skidanov initially wanted to study AI and program synthesis. But, like people who have been climbing mountains for a long time and then realize that the old methods are not suitable for new paths, they finally turned to blockchain. Not because they followed the trend, but because of necessity.

NEAR was born from frustration with blockchain which at that time was slow and difficult to use. Just imagine, you are told to build an application but use a system that even for small updates requires expensive gas fees and has to wait for confirmation for hours. Well, they wanted to change that.

Furthermore, Illia thought that blockchain could be a suitable place for AI, as long as it was made fast enough and affordable.

NEAR carried a sharding approach from the start, not a patch in the middle of the road. It’s like building a house from the start knowing that there will be five children, not suddenly renovating every time there is an additional family. This model allows NEAR to remain fast even though the number of users has increased.

However, that doesn’t mean everything went smoothly. In the beginning, finding funding was also not easy. But investors slowly began to see their seriousness. NEAR raised more than half a billion dollars in a few years. While other projects were rebranding or just playing with buzzwords, NEAR stayed focused on one thing: building something that would last.

Illia, on the other hand, never really left the AI ​​scene. Lately, he’s been pushing for the integration of AI and blockchain through NEAR AI. His main mission? Keeping AI from becoming a monopoly of big companies. If your data has been sucked up without you knowing, he wants a system where users can have control. It may look idealistic, but if not now, when?

Why Illia Polosukhin Thinks AI Should Answer to Us Too

When interviewed on various podcasts, he looks more like an engineer who likes to chat about systems than a startup boss. Sometimes explaining the technicalities quickly, but still stopping to throw out a light sentence like, “If AI can be a DAO, why can’t humans be consulted too?”

Furthermore, he even initiated a protocol called Proof of Response. Not for show, but to solve a real problem: how do we know if the AI’s responses are being generated correctly and honestly? It’s not just about code, it’s also about ethics.

Now, Illia is back as CEO of the NEAR Foundation. But don’t imagine a formal figure in a suit and tie. He still looks more comfortable in a hoodie, with the attitude of someone who would rather discuss network optimization than attend a motivational seminar.