The background of NEAR and the journey of its co-founder Illia Polosukhin.

Illia Polosukhin is a co-founder of NEAR, which aims to improve the usability and scalability of blockchain technology from the foundational level. He is an advocate for ensuring that AI remains decentralized, ethical, and under user control, resisting domination by large tech companies. While many are preoccupied with the volatile fluctuations of cryptocurrency prices, Polosukhin has opted to focus on a more profound, yet less sensational, aspect: building the infrastructure. Rather than merely participating in token creation, he is establishing a solid framework. This foundation is known as NEAR Protocol, but let’s take a step back for a moment. Before becoming a co-founder of one of the most developer-friendly Layer-1 blockchains in existence today, Illia grew up in Ukraine during a period of economic instability. In the midst of soaring inflation affecting adults, he remained focused on something constant: computer logic. By the age of 10, he had already begun creating his own games. While you were just mastering Snake on a black-and-white mobile phone, he was busy creating his own video games from the ground up. It’s not surprising that he eventually joined Google and became a member of the team responsible for developing Transformers, which ultimately led to innovations like GPT and BERT. Surprisingly, rather than enjoying the comfort of a cushy chair at Google and sipping coffee each afternoon, Illia opted to venture out and create something that was uncertain to succeed. From Frustration to Foundation: The Journey Behind the Creation of NEAR. Following their departure from Google in 2017, Illia and his partner Alexander Skidanov aimed to focus on research in AI and program synthesis.