Most blockchains were built for humans. NEAR is building for AI agents — and quantum-proof wallets are just the start. Illia Polosukhin, Co-
About this episode
Illia Polosukhin discusses how NEAR Protocol is building a blockchain for AI agents and the implications of quantum-proof wallets.
AI agents are already executing financial transactions autonomously — but the infrastructure they're running on was never designed for them. NEAR Protocol is building the settlement layer for the agentic economy: a blockchain where agents can express outcomes, route cross-chain transactions, and operate with built-in privacy guarantees — without a human in the loop for every step. Illia Polosukhin, Co-Founder of NEAR Protocol and co-author of Google's "Attention Is All You Need" — the 2017 paper that introduced the Transformer architecture behind ChatGPT, Gemini, and every major LLM running today — joins Ashton Addison on Blockchain Interviews. Illia breaks down how NEAR Intents lets agents express desired outcomes and have the protocol handle routing, bridging, and gas automatically; how IronClaw enables persistent, privacy-preserving AI agents with controlled access to user assets; and why NEAR just shipped a quantum-proof wallet upgrade at a moment when most of the industry isn't thinking about post-quantum security at all. You'll learn: How NEAR Intents works and why expressing an outcome rather than specifying a route changes what's possible for AI agents in financial…
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