Bio
Illia Polosukhin is a Co-Founder of NEAR Protocol and serves as CEO of the NEAR Foundation. He co-founded NEAR with Alexander Skidanov after an initial AI tooling venture begun around 2017–2018, and has shaped the project's evolution from a developer-focused blockchain to a chain-abstraction and user-owned AI platform.
Before founding NEAR, Polosukhin worked as a machine-learning researcher at Google and contributed to the research team behind "Attention Is All You Need" (2017), the landmark paper introducing the Transformer architecture. He is one of multiple co-authors of that paper; the invention is a collective achievement of the full research group, not attributed to any single person.
NEAR Protocol launched its mainnet in 2020 and has continued evolving, with Polosukhin leading the NEAR Foundation's 2026 priorities around Confidential Intents, NEAR AI, dynamic resharding (IronClaw), quantum-safe signing and an agent-economy strategy. NEAR Intents and chain abstraction are ecosystem infrastructure initiatives, not personal products owned by Polosukhin. The NEAR Foundation's governance is separate from the NEAR Protocol network, its validators, the House of Stake and NEAR token holders.
Information last checked: August 2026
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