Illia Polosukhin

▸ Co-author of "Attention Is All You Need"

Co-founder and CEO of NEAR Protocol. Co-author of the landmark 2017 paper "Attention Is All You Need" — the research that birthed the Transformer architecture powering modern AI. Now building User-Owned AI infrastructure and decentralized agent execution environments on NEAR, uniquely positioned at the intersection of both industries.

AIAI infrastructureZKuser-owned AIL1

Proof Badges

𝕏Active on X↗Has Website

Projects

NEAR AI● activeAI

Confidential decentralized AI computation platform — private, verifiable AI inference for enterprises and developers.

Visit ↗

NEAR Protocol● activeAI

Layer 1 blockchain focused on user-owned AI infrastructure and decentralized agent execution environments.

Visit ↗

RECENT ACTIVITY

NEAR Protocol crossed $1B market cap

coingecko14d ago

Illia Polosukhin open-sourced near-docs-mintlify on GitHub

github14d ago

Illia Polosukhin open-sourced near-connect-ledger on GitHub

github14d ago

Builders Like This

Austen Allred@Austen

Co-founder of Lambda School (now BloomTech) — the ISA-based coding bootcamp. Now building Gauntlet AI — a 10-week AI engineering intensive turning developers into AI builders. Also built KellyClaude, an AI executive assistant.

CEO of Gauntlet AI — risk management and optimization platform for DeFi protocols

AIBase

Both building DeFi protocol on AI

Tayler Melvin@tayler_melvin

Marketing Lead at Bitso and Bitso Onchain — Latin America's largest crypto platform (9M+ users). Bitso Onchain is Bitso's self-custody DEX launched July 2025: 17,000+ tokens across 14 blockchains, zero gas fees, token in 2026. Previously Community Lead at Socket Protocol and Bungee Exchange. Also building DegenDome — a competitive Solana trading platform where bots battle in leveraged trades with 30-second oracle-based predictions.

AISolanaBagsApp

Both building DeFi protocol on AI

Humayun Sheikh@HMsheikh4

Founder and CEO of Fetch.ai — one of the first autonomous AI agent networks on blockchain. Co-founded the Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) Alliance in 2024 with SingularityNET and Ocean Protocol, unifying tokens under FET. Ocean Protocol withdrew from the alliance in October 2025 amid a governance dispute. ASI Alliance (Fetch.ai, SingularityNET, CUDOS) continues building decentralized AI infrastructure.

Founded Fetch.ai; co-led ASI Alliance token merger — FET unified with AGIX and CUDOS

AIEthereum

Both building DeFi protocol on AI