Exclusive Interview with NEAR Co-Founder Illia Polosukhin | KBW2023

[Music] so I mean gener AI really is kind of foundational technology that you can leverage across a lot of use cases and I think the it starts really with all the kind of being a an assistant for your kind of creative needs right so you know we already sees this as you know helping to create content be that text or uh videos or a audio or images um but this then transitions into being your co-pilot for code for research you know for summarization for like read things on your behalf and you know summarize it for you and then transitions into I think really more interesting use cases like personalized tutor right something where you're have an AI that actually tracks how you're learning and adjusts uh such that you learn like you know Fuller better faster and so can acem is for example doing really interesting work there so it's a wide variety of those and then that will transition into becoming actually one level lower where it will be actually the traditional use cases of you know SAS software or uh kind of interactions between companies which are powered by a i and there's a hood but it's not actually in front of you right so like it may be that um instead of building a new SAS like SAS software company right you can just uh describe the business process and it gets generated and like fully autom runs automatically without needing to have a new company right so things like that is like it's a VI do just cases and we'll be also discovering new things as things [Music] go I would say I mean there's still a ton of investors that are looking at lab three and I think it just matured right I think and we've seen similar things happening from 17 to 18 right it's not like the investors gotten away they just became more um kind of structured and and really looking at kind of more fundamentals or team quality uh before investing and so because of that there's obviously like less investment being made and like people are uh kind of evaluating projects more thoroughly uh than was before as we've seen in 21 I mean I'm optimistic for a few reasons one is we see things actually working now we have real use cases that actually are better than web 2 that are solving real business need and uh or like a new customer experience right that people didn't have before and I don't think we've had that ever before right like I mean def kind of like showed the glimpse of this in Def summer but now we actually see some of those things actually like you know connecting to real world you know like I mentioned your tasks like creating marketplaces that anybody can participate that are better for both sides and so I think that is really um kind of shows that you know like as those products mature and become kind of dominant players in their markets right not in that three but in actual like data crowdsourcing or payments or that are powered by blockchain we'll see more and more of that adoption so it's just like it's not going to be this explosive you know uh kind of hype adoption it's really more about like real businesses being built and grown and actually Genera revenue and they are powered by web 3 underneath and kind of creating uh more either marketplaces or more composability between pieces so I think I mean the payments is the first one that everybody talks about I think we now see the real change right so we just saw like Visa use it stable coins we just on near A kaai ching just launched uh and became top number one app on D radar they have millions of users kind of coming in starting to use it for payments for micro payments and they chose near because it's cheaper than using stripe like they're literally business decision like stripe is you know 2.7% plus 5025 near is like fraction of a cent boom very easy decision right and like one second settlement instead of you know two weeks uh second one I think as I mentioned like marketplaces right so right now we have everything from you know eBay and similar to uh kind of marketplace like Airbnb Uber gig marketplaces right all of them right now have like there's a company that operates a Marketplace that have a ton of uh kind of expense and work to do Market expansions they need to do a lot of things to really kind of coordinate this Global marketplaces with payment Network underneath right actually solves most of their problem right like building an Uber like company on top of blockchain is way easier and way cheaper to operate right so this just solves like a lot of problems that you would need to do and again near task is a great example because it's like a Marketplace for doing gig work and uh like it you know for a while we just had like an experiment smart contract on near that just ran this Marketplace it had zero employees zero cost and just like operated with like 2,000 people working on it daily right so stuff like this is just like it's possible now with blockchain and I think that would be a big change and finally the kind of Creator economy social part is where I think a lot of interesting thing will be happening I mean we saw friendtech uh we see some like land and other folks kind of experimenting I think that's a really interesting new way of how uh creators can have their audience more directly and uh not be bound to any specific uh platform and monetizing or engaging with them in different ways and so I think it will take a little bit longer to mature but that's a really kind of powerful use case so I think it really depends on definition of metaverse right I think the the definition of metaverse kind of where you know you had this like you you know Ready Player one where you have you know you jump between different gaming worlds with your sword and you know that probably is like very like if you talk to game developers they don't want that nobody wants you know the sword to go between different worlds uh it's actually very complicated from game design perspective uh I think there will be things like you know Minecraft uh kind of versions that are maybe more uh you know a Constructor where people can build their own things like user generated content where there's ownership there nfts and things like that but it's not will be about that it'll be about like how interesting exciting you can build the uh kind of world within a specific set of constraints I think from my perspective we already in metaverse right we're already spending most of our time on our phones in kind of digital world like our Digital Life is actually you know bigger and richer uh potentially than our physical and so I think the question really is like what is metaverse and so I think for me it's more about that like aspect it's not about the you know 3D VR GLE stuff uh but really about like more social interactions and everything moving into more uh digital realm as well as you know having this ownership and uh kind of social interactions happening through uh decentralized identity decentralized Computing so we have a whole clue of things we're going to be uh kind of talking more about this in coming months but so a very specific thing that's coming out is so-called fast fast o so fast o we launched in May uh kind of in uh limited form on.org so this is a way for users to sign up they just enter email do face ID or fingerprint and they have a blockchain account they can start using blockchain without onboarding installing wallets seeing private Keys seed phrases don't need tokens to start using it so that's kind of the like we build that we launched on new.org we have you know over 20,000 people signed up we have like really good uh on boarding rates now we turning that into a service that everybody can use and so the idea there that uh any other app um can actually integrate that and become uh like on board all their users including that you can actually on board all the existing users you have if you have their emails into the system without them doing any additional uh work and then this will expand into what we call fastos multichain so this is uh where your fastos account actually can act on other chains as well not just on there and so we're going to be expanding that and kind of providing that and this really overlaps with what we have with front end so we have decentralized front ends blockchain operating system and so alt together this provides really an environment where you can build and interact with applications on different chains without users actually thinking about it so the idea that um you should be able to you know just go to a website and start using app and not think about which blockchain it's on do you have assets there how to move them all those things right it's just a kind of straight interaction so we're building up to that like we're having kind of this layers and pieces coming coming together and so in next uh kind of uh four or five months this is all maturing finally uh on the blockchain side we've kind of been been investing in ZK and uh some of the interesting new things around how do we speed up the blog blog time while actually increase throughput so we're working on some of the new updates there and we're going to be talking about it at newon in November and the other really interesting thing that's happening is near digital Collective so this is our governance framework that's um being explored by the community and so there's actually elections are in progress and people are kind of debating and figuring out how to do governance in this decentralized EOS systems uh so kind of a lot of exciting stuff across the stack everything from the blockchain level to the community to the really interacting as apps and kind of becoming more of a entry point right to web 3 where anybody can come in and start using blockchain without really thinking about the technology adies I think kind of the point I've been making around I think in a couple of years we will be really thinking about the applications not about blockchains and so users really will kind of interact with either application or super apps even uh where you have lots of different experiences combined into one place and so the blockchains will be just powering kind of on the back end and they you know they will be important they provide a lot of security but zero knowledge and kind of some of the uh new technologies that's coming up will actually mitigate a lot of the risks that right now we see uh when we evaluate blockchains right so like hey you know it's less decentralized Etc well if you have a zero knowledge proof actually um provides you security Now that you can rely on this blockchain so there's like new piece of technologies that going to kind of make the uh blockchain space more unified and and block space cheaper and it will be more about the applications and kind of access layer and attention layer as well as identity and so this is why we focused on kind of fast to Identity on boarding as well as front ends and retention there uh and this front end framework really allows to build super apps like a super app framework uh where you know you can have dii aggregator for all the defi apps on all the chains and all the layer tools and layer ones really in one place and kind of really easy to maintain that and so this is where we see kind of the future coming and and kind of we building pieces of that uh together with other partners in the ecosystem