Illia Polosukhin: NEAR Is Ready For The Quantum Era (Full Thesis)

Illia Polosukhin (0:00)

We need privacy, we need private AI, we need private money, we need to unite and really kind of connect, not just Web3, but also like the rest of the market.

Robbie (0:09)

My name's Robbie, and you're watching The Rollup. And today, I'm asking you to please subscribe, comment, like, and support our channel. We interview some of the best and brightest minds in digital assets, digital finance, and tokenization. We are doing this for you. So please sit back, relax, enjoy the show, and thank you so much for all your support. And now we're going to have Illia, right? One of the, I call him one of the founding fathers of AI. I think he truly is. Illia, welcome to the show.

Illia Polosukhin (0:38)

Founding uncles. Founding uncles of AI. He's an uncle.

Robbie (0:41)

Illia's the uncle.

Andy (0:42)

He's got two kids. We got this book from Ellie about zero-knowledge proofs. Alex on our team back there has your plaque with the Attention Is All That You Need. That's going to go up in the office in New York City. Great event. Big couple weeks for Nier.

Look, man, you're a humble guy, Illia.

You're very smart, very humble. How do you feel about the last six to eight weeks about Nier? I feel like the whole market has woken up to Nier. I've seen Nier everywhere. People are calling it like Zcash is a Bitcoin of this bull market. Nier is the Ethereum. Things are getting crazy quick. Humbly, kind of like where do you see things now? Where do you see things going? Where are we at?

Illia Polosukhin (1:21)

Yeah, I mean, you know Nier, right? We've been building sort of like bull and bear through the past, like, what, eight years?

Andy (1:29)

Yeah.

Illia Polosukhin (1:30)

Nine years, if you include the AI before that. So we have a vision. The world is changing and we need the decentralized technology. We need privacy. We need private AI. We need private money. We need to unite and really kind of connect, not just Web3, but also like rest of the markets.

And so it's exciting to see more and more people joining. It's obviously like has massive flywheel effects on products.

Obviously, you know, market price is important because it gives everyone more resources, attracts more attention. And so it's exciting to kind of have all this action and we're going to continue turning that into more products, more value. Yeah, man.

Andy (2:10)

I mean, I think like the thing that has just become such, such so apparent to the market and to me is that, I mean, we're here at this Quantum Privacy Day with Quantis, right? They just launched their tokens doing exceptionally well.

Big congrats to them.

You know, the the near intents and the near.com experience, the black box of privacy of trading, perbs, swaps, bridging is just immaculate. It's so good. Like it is just it is just a truck. Bought is my harness. near.com is my is my on-chain harness, right? But extrapolating that, we talked about this last night over some wine in that there is a new world that you guys are getting into where it's like you are becoming the trading venue for the on-chain speculative assets of this bull market. Qantas being one, and we're talking about that other token Pearl. I'm just curious how you think about near intents as this kind of broader chain abstraction vision that you once had. Now it's coming to fruition. Qantas is a fantastic example. There's no centralized exchange listings. You can only buy it on safe trade. But it's on near intents. It's on near.com. I was swapping into it this morning and last night. It's easy as hell. And there's good liquidity. It happened so fast. Just talk to us about what that vision is for near intents and near.com to bootstrap, I guess, the high quality speculative assets of this next era of this industry.

Illia Polosukhin (3:28)

Yeah, I mean, so near intents kind of, the broadest form of vision, right, is like it's a market of markets, right? It's effectively this universal aggregator of anyone wanting to trade anything anywhere and being able to do it through kind of like finding the best counterparty to do it, right? And I'm not talking about just crypto, I'm not talking about just physical like digital assets, if you wanna order a room in a hotel, if you wanna build a base on Mars, right, there's gonna be a counterparty that will be willing to do that, right? Elon Musk is like, okay, cool, I'll do it for two trillion dollars, right? So that's a broadest form of vision, right? And we kind of started with like, okay, chain obstruction is like really first problem that, I mean, we've been in crypto for a while. This is like the most painful thing you can imagine, right? Then now we just added stocks, right? So now you're aggregating actually not just crypto venues, you actually now have NASDAQ and New York Stock Exchange, and we're gonna be adding more venues as well. So whenever you're sending an intent and you're saying, hey, I wanna load up on, let's say, Sovereign, right?