#119 - ILLIA POLOSUKHIN

Illia is a Co-Founder of NEAR Protocol, a fully sharded, proof-of-stake, Layer 1 blockchain. NEAR has raised over $500 million and is widely considered one of the most promising projects in the blockchain space. Prior to NEAR, Illia managed a team of Deep Learning and Natural Language Understanding Researchers at Google Research where he worked on building TensorFlow. Follow Illia on Twitter @ilblackdragon. [2:18] - How an early interest in computer programming led Illia down a path towards artificial intelligence and blockchains [16:45] - Existing blockchain issues that led to the creation of the NEAR Protocol [19:52] - NEAR’s focus on scalability and usability for long-term adoption [26:00] - Why Illia views sharding as the superior strategy to scale blockchains [34:47] - NEAR’s approach to encourage adoption of its tech stack [47:20] - Governance considerations for NEAR’s decentralized ecosystem [55:10] - The coming convergence of blockchain and artificial intelligence --- Support the show by checking out my sponsors: Join Levels and get personalized insights to learn about your metabolic health. Go to https://levels.link/jake. --- https://homeofjake.com