SAN FRANCISCO — As artificial intelligence quietly becomes the everyday interface for millions — drafting emails, planning trips, automating workflows — blockchain still feels like heavy infrastructure. Illia Polosukhin, co‑founder of NEAR, says that gap won’t last long: AI agents, not humans, will be the primary users of blockchains.
“AI is going to be on the front end, and blockchain is going to be the back end,” Polosukhin told us. In his view, AI will absorb the messy, technical parts of crypto — wallets, explorers, transaction hashes — and present a simple, agent-driven surface to end users. “The goal is to make your AI hide all the blockchain,” he said. “The fact that we have [blockchain] explorers is effectively a failure, because we don’t abstract the technology.”
That thesis cuts against much of crypto’s recent flirtation with AI, which has tended toward speculative tokens, memecoins and novelty trading bots. Instead of token-led hype, Polosukhin expects a subtler, structural convergence: AI agents executing payments, managing portfolios, coordinating services and even casting governance votes on behalf of people. Humans will interact with AI assistants; those assistants will interact directly with protocols.
“AI is the front end, not just for blockchain, but for everything,” he said. “In a few years, it’s going to be just AI, like the operating system.” That could explain why crypto hasn’t yet had an “AI moment” comparable to the consumer boom in generative tools: blockchain’s core strength is financial infrastructure, and Polosukhin argues finance underpins many facets of life.
If he’s right, crypto’s most important role may be as neutral financial rails — settlement, ownership, verifiability, programmable incentives — that sit beneath AI platforms rather than competing with them. But Polosukhin is also critical of how the industry has approached AI and governance so far.
“In blockchain, we propose technical solutions before asking: what is the core problem?” he said, pointing to DAOs as an example. “DAOs have dramatically failed because they have been unbounded, not really designed to solve any problem.” For him, governance tools (including AI‑assisted voting agents) only make sense when tied to concrete economic or coordination needs — not as open‑ended experiments.
Culture is another barrier. Polosukhin warned that memecoins and rampant speculation are damaging crypto’s credibility with serious AI researchers. “AI people are banning crypto effectively because of memecoins,” he said.
Longer term, he sees the convergence focused on infrastructure: as AI systems act on users’ behalf — paying bills, hiring contractors, allocating capital — they will demand trusted execution, privacy, and programmable financial coordination that blockchains can provide. “Blockchain is about neutral markets and neutral infrastructure,” Polosukhin said.
That suggests a future where crypto isn’t the app users open, but the invisible settlement layer their AI agents quietly depend on. NEAR itself is moving in that direction: the company recently launched the Near.com super app, promoting AI capabilities and confidential transactions as part of its push toward this backend role.
Watch for the next wave of innovation to come from infrastructure playbooks — not flashy token drops, but the plumbing that lets AI safely and privately transact, verify, and coordinate on behalf of users.
https://orcid.org/0009-0009-1599-2739
