Inside NEAR: 10+ Years Building Toward the Agent Economy with Illia Polosukhin
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…
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