NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin announced that AI-assisted hacking has emerged since last October, outpacing traditional code reviews in effectiveness. In response to this growing challenge, he advocates for leveraging AI to enhance formal verification processes, making them faster and more cost-effective while ensuring that code functions as intended. This development aligns with NEAR’s broader goal of creating infrastructure to support an evolving agent economy, a vision informed by Polosukhin’s deep background in AI, including his authorship of the influential Transformer paper that underpins technologies such as ChatGPT.

NEAR: NEAR is a layer-1 blockchain protocol designed for scalable decentralized applications and user-friendly infrastructure. It is actively building open systems for the emerging agent economy, incorporating cross-chain execution, confidential settlement, and private inference capabilities. Co-founded by Illia Polosukhin, the project has emphasized AI integration from its inception due to his background in foundational AI research.
Illia Polosukhin: Illia Polosukhin is the co-founder of NEAR Protocol and a co-author of the Transformer paper that powers modern AI systems like ChatGPT. He has highlighted the rise of AI-assisted hacking and advocates using AI tools to accelerate formal verification, enabling mathematical proofs that code behaves as intended. His expertise bridges AI and blockchain development.

AI Origins: NEAR’s AI positioning is rooted in its co-founder’s role as a co-author of the Transformer paper underlying systems like ChatGPT.
AI Infrastructure: NEAR is developing infrastructure to support the agent economy, including cross-chain execution, confidential settlement, and private inference.