SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. – For years, the crypto industry has been searching for its next breakout moment — something on the scale of the DeFi summer or the NFT boom. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence has quietly embedded itself in everyday life. Developers use ChatGPT as a co-pilot. Consumers rely on AI assistants to draft emails, plan trips and increasingly manage workflows. Crypto, by comparison, still feels infrastructural.
Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of NEAR, believes that the gap is collapsing – but not in the way many expect.
“The users of blockchain will be AI agents,” Polosukhin said in an interview. “AI is going to be on the front end and blockchain is going to be the back end.”
His framing cuts to much of crypto’s recent experiments with AI, which have largely centered on speculative tokens, memecoins, and agent-themed trading bots. Instead, Polosukhin argues that AI will become the primary interface layer for everything online, including crypto, wallet abstraction, explorers, and transaction hashing.
“The goal is to make your AI hide all the blockchain,” he said. “The fact that we have [blockchain] explorers is actually a failure because we don’t abstract the technology.”
In this view, the blockchain doesn’t disappear – it recedes. AI agents interact directly with protocols, perform payments, manage assets, coordinate services and even vote in governance systems. Humans, meanwhile, interact with AI.
“AI is the front end, not just for blockchain, but for everything,” Polosukhin said. “In a few years, it will be just artificial intelligence, just like the operating system.”
That shift, he argues, could explain why crypto hasn’t had an “AI moment” comparable to the consumer explosion of generative tools. “Blockchain is inherently financial,” he said. “It will be limited to finance, but everything we do in our lives is finance.”
Instead of competing with AI platforms, crypto’s role could be to provide neutral financial rails beneath them: settlement, ownership, verifiability and programmable incentives.
Still, Polosukhin is critical of how the industry has approached both AI and governance so far — comments that come just days after Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin proposed “AI stewards” to help reinvent DAO governance.
“In blockchain, we propose technical solutions before asking: what is the core problem?” he said.
He points to decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs, as an example. “DAOs have failed dramatically because they have been unconstrained, not really designed to solve any problem,” he said, arguing that governance tools, including AI-assisted voting agents, only make sense if tied to clearly defined economic or coordination needs.
Another point of friction between the AI and crypto communities has been culture. “Memecoins destroy [the industry’s] reputation,” Polosukhin said, arguing that rampant speculation and scams have alienated serious AI researchers. “AI people are effectively banning crypto because of memecoins.”
However, the long-term convergence may be less about token launches and more about infrastructure. As AI systems increasingly act on behalf of users, such as paying bills, renting services, allocating capital, they will require reliable execution, privacy and programmable financial coordination.
“Blockchain is about neutral markets and neutral infrastructure,” Polosukhin said.
If AI becomes the Internet’s operating system, crypto’s future may lie not in being open to app users, but in becoming the invisible settlement layer their AI agents quietly depend on.
Read more: NEAR Launches Near.com Super App Highlighting AI Capabilities and Confidential Transactions
