NEAR's Plan to Power an Economy Run Entirely by AI

Host John Gillen speaks with NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin about the protocol’s ambition to become a vertically integrated stack for AI-driven commerce. Polosukhin describes NEAR Intents as an exchange of exchanges that lets agents coordinate transactions across blockchains and, eventually, markets ranging from financial assets to real-world services.

The discussion examines why privacy and security are prerequisites for broader blockchain adoption. Polosukhin explains NEAR’s confidential AI infrastructure, Shield’s active monitoring of cross-chain activity, and the role formal verification could play as AI models become increasingly capable of finding and exploiting software vulnerabilities.

Polosukhin also outlines how the NEAR token fits into the strategy through staking, inference capacity, network security, fees, and payments to compute providers. He argues that personal and corporate agents could eventually transact, hire services, and operate businesses on users’ behalf, while acknowledging that adoption depends on better security, privacy, and integration with existing commerce.