Near Protocol (NEAR)

In the agent economy, every serious builder deserves recognition for their work. @NearBuilders is building the systems to make that happen with nomination bot, daily engine, and focused spotlights on real shipping. Visibility → connections → opportunities. Follow @nearbuilders for updates and builder highlights.

INTERVIEW: AI, Surveillance, & the Fight for Digital Sovereignty | Near's Illia Polosukhin What happens when powerful AI requires an ID, governments can restrict access by country, and your most private data flows through centralized systems? @NEARProtocol co-founder @ilblackdragon joins @TrustlessState to explain why AI export controls could fracture the internet, how nationalized AI could become a surveillance layer, and why decentralized, user-owned AI may be the only real alternative. They also unpack Ironclaw, confidential inference, private agents, and NEAR’s push to make AI and assets fully sovereign. [TIMESTAMPS] 0:00 Intro 3:47 Pandora’s Box Opens 6:03 AI Meets Government 7:16 Decentralizing the Stack 8:51 Why Ban Fable? 11:18 Internet Balkanization 13:57 KYC for AI? 18:43 Nationalized Models 21:07 Building Private AI 26:30 Agent Marketplace 30:26 User-Owned Alignment 35:28 Winning Against Giants 40:19 Regulation Fuels Crypto 42:24 Global AI Adoption 45:05 Compute Is the Bottleneck 49:00 Enterpris

Look at the data from the recent market moves. While meme coins crashed hard, AI-related tokens completely led the market cap surge. Near jumped 69%, Akash rose 51%, and Fetch climbed 39%. Capital within crypto is not leaving evenly; it is concentrating heavily into AI-related infrastructure. The message is clear: pivot to AI or get left behind.

I almost buried this interview. Back in February, I sat down with @ilblackdragon the Founder of $NEAR. The quality wasn’t perfect. I was traveling. The window to film it was tiny. So I never released it. But the conversation never left my mind. We talked about AI, crypto, capitalism, sovereignty, agents, privacy, robotics, and what happens when software stops being software and becomes intelligence. This was the first time I really understood why blockchain may not just be “finance infrastructure”... It may be the only thing that stops AI from becoming owned by a few centralized gods. User-owned AI. Private agents. Sovereign data. A post-SaaS world. A post-AGI society. This conversation changed my entire worldview. Releasing it now. Hope you enjoy.

⁉️ NEAR COMMUNITY POLL: are you in favor or against the HSP-027: Remove the NEAR Developer Gas Rebate? + i'm trying to decide my vote (~300K veNEAR weight) + currently leaning towards YES (FOR), but still not sure + i want to see more community inputs it's using the experimental `fast track` voting method --> only FOR votes are allowed and the proposal ends once threshold is met or after seven days of its launch (set for June 27) i'm definitely not a fan of using `fast track` for such a protocol-level and tokenomic important decision -- we need more community/devs inputs for that, imo but things are what they are, so let's make the best out of it WDYT? ↓

INTERVIEW: AI, Surveillance, & the Fight for Digital Sovereignty | Near's Illia Polosukhin What happens when powerful AI requires an ID, governments can restrict access by country, and your most private data flows through centralized systems? @NEARProtocol co-founder @ilblackdragon joins @TrustlessState to explain why AI export controls could fracture the internet, how nationalized AI could become a surveillance layer, and why decentralized, user-owned AI may be the only real alternative. They also unpack Ironclaw, confidential inference, private agents, and NEAR’s push to make AI and assets fully sovereign. [TIMESTAMPS] 0:00 Intro 3:47 Pandora’s Box Opens 6:03 AI Meets Government 7:16 Decentralizing the Stack 8:51 Why Ban Fable? 11:18 Internet Balkanization 13:57 KYC for AI? 18:43 Nationalized Models 21:07 Building Private AI 26:30 Agent Marketplace 30:26 User-Owned Alignment 35:28 Winning Against Giants 40:19 Regulation Fuels Crypto 42:24 Global AI Adoption 45:05 Compute Is the Bottleneck 49:00 Enterpris

NEAR One has introduced SPICE a huge milestone with many practical improvements for users and devs + 600ms to 200ms + parallelization + preparation for atomic transactions in this video I go through what is SPICE, why the Separation of Consensus and Execution matters for @NEARProtocol users, and give an easier explanation on what happens under the hood --- WHAT CHANGES ⚡️ the first and must obvious improvement is transaction finality 10-20x faster than VISA, as fast as physical limitations allow a network to be (lightspeed), from 600ms (today) to 200ms (post-SPICE) 🌐 then, parallelization improves network efficiency and scalability, as many complex transactions can execute in the background at the same time one big execution (tx) doesn't delay other transactions ⚛️ looking ahead, SPICE sets the ground for upcoming improvements that aim to bring atomic transactions to NEAR, solving one of the current main criticisms and security concerns for NEAR that is async cross-contract calls but this is a topic

New episode with @Bankless ft. my perspective on the Fable ban and the new reality we're living in, why it's still all about compute, and why sovereignty matters for users and companies ⬇️