Share this article
IIlia Polosukhin: A Crypto+AI Pioneer
The co-founder of NEAR is working to create a full ecosystem for decentralized AI.
Updated Dec 10, 2024, 7:56 p.m. Published Dec 10, 2024, 3:30 p.m.
There are many in the Web3 space who have only recently jumped into AI. Illia Polosukhin isn’t one of them. Long before he co-founded the decentralized app blockchain protocol NEAR, Polosukhin worked at Google as an AI researcher and co-wrote the seminal 2017 paper “Attention is All you Need,” which is widely credited as pioneering the “transformer” technology that powers popular large language model (LLMs) AI apps such as ChatGPT. His AI credentials are impeccable.
“AI is a really powerful force,” Polosukhin told me in 2023, “but what we don't want is it to be controlled and biased by a single company.” So now Polosukhin is marrying his original love (AI) with NEAR’s mission of decentralization, working to create an entire ecosystem for decentralized AI, from compute to training to agents.
STORY CONTINUES BELOW
At NEAR’s recent [Redacted] conference in Bangkok, there were literal signs everywhere showing just how seriously Polosukhin is taking this: “AI is NEAR.”
This profile is part of CoinDesk's Most Influential 2024 package. For all of this year's nominees, click here.
Más para ti
Lo que debes saber:
- As of October 2025, GoPlus has generated $4.7M in total revenue across its product lines. The GoPlus App is the primary revenue driver, contributing $2.5M (approx. 53%), followed by the SafeToken Protocol at $1.7M.
- GoPlus Intelligence's Token Security API averaged 717 million monthly calls year-to-date in 2025 , with a peak of nearly 1 billion calls in February 2025. Total blockchain-level requests, including transaction simulations, averaged an additional 350 million per month.
- Since its January 2025 launch , the $GPS token has registered over $5B in total spot volume and $10B in derivatives volume in 2025. Monthly spot volume peaked in March 2025 at over $1.1B , while derivatives volume peaked the same month at over $4B.
Больше для вас
ZKsync Lite to Shut Down in 2026 as Matter Labs Moves On
The company framed the move, happening in early 2026, as a planned sunset.
Что нужно знать:
- Matter Labs plans to deprecate ZKsync Lite, the first iteration of its Ethereum layer-2 network, the team said in a post on X over the weekend.
- The company framed the move, happening in early 2026, as a planned sunset for an early proof-of-concept that helped validate their zero-knowledge rollup design choices before newer systems went live.
Top Stories
