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Illia Polosukhin
NEAR’s New Token Utility and AI Economy | Illia Polosukhin
- NEAR AI Cloud offers end-to-end confidential and verifiable AI inference by stripping away system prompts and providing cryptographic proof of model outputs, addressing concerns about hidden filtering by centralized providers like OpenAI and Anthropic. - Staking NEAR tokens now generates yield that can be converted into inference access, creating a "universal basic AI" utility model where token holders receive proportional compute capacity without recurring subscription fees. - NEAR's vertically integrated stack—combining blockchain, Confidential Intents, IronClaw agents, and AI Cloud—enables autonomous businesses to run 24/7 with persistent access to intelligence, finance, and on-chain execution without depleting treasury. - NEAR Intents facilitate a decentralized compute marketplace where GPU providers receive NEAR emissions based on inference volume, and revenue from transaction fees flows back into protocol buybacks and validator rewards. - Partnerships with Venice, Brave, Bermuda government, and remittance providers demonstrate real-world demand for privacy-preserving AI in financial and governance contexts. - NEAR positions itself as "AI money" by combining sovereign security (blockchain), verifiable intelligence access (staking), and transaction settlement (Intents) to capture value across AI agent activity.
AI, Surveillance, and the Fight for Digital Sovereignty | Near's Illia Polosukhin
- AI export controls & internet precedent: The US government's ban on Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Fable sets a dangerous precedent for restricting internet services by country, potentially fracturing global access to critical infrastructure and technology. - Nationalization risk for AI labs: As governments recognize AI's power (comparable to nuclear weapons), they will likely move to nationalize leading AI companies to maintain control, forcing KYC requirements and full data surveillance on users. - Decentralized AI as the countermeasure: Near is building a sovereign AI stack—confidential inference, Ironclaw agents, and private smart contracts—allowing users to access powerful models without KYC, data leakage, or government surveillance. - User-owned alignment vs. corporate alignment: General alignment is a myth; real alignment means systems work exclusively for the individual user or specific company, not broad society. Blockchain tokenization solves OpenAI's capital formation problem and ensures user-company alignment. - Agent marketplace & confidential compute: Specialized agents can be hired on-chain with verifiable privacy guarantees, enabling businesses to delegate sensitive work (CRM access, email, financial data) without data breach risk. - Compute as the real bottleneck: Hyperscalers control most GPU supply through 2026, but cost arbitrage and model routing make open-weight alternatives economically viable for most enterprises, especially as Claude costs spiral.