Crypto Coin Show · 2026-06-20 · 31 min
AI agents are already executing financial transactions autonomously - but the infrastructure they're running on was never designed for them. NEAR Protocol is building the settlement layer for the agentic economy: a blockchain where agents can express outcomes, route cross-chain transactions, and operate with built-in privacy guarantees - without a human in the loop for every step. Illia Polosukhin, Co-Founder of NEAR Protocol and co-author of Google's "Attention Is All You Need" - the 2017 paper that introduced the Transformer architecture behind ChatGPT, Gemini, and every major LLM running today - joins Ashton Addison on Blockchain Interviews. Illia breaks down how NEAR Intents lets agents express desired outcomes and have the protocol handle routing, bridging, and gas automatically; how IronClaw enables persistent, privacy-preserving AI agents with controlled access to user assets; and why NEAR just shipped a quantum-proof wallet upgrade at a moment when most of the industry isn't thinking about post-quantum security at all.
Restaking was just the beginning. Symbiotic's co-founder on building the collateral markets layer that RWAs, credit, and insurance all run o64 / 100Half of internet traffic is bots - and XION just rebuilt itself to fix that. Anthony Anzalone, Founder & CEO of VeronaMost exchanges take a cut on every trade before it happens. Ouinex built a different model - Ilies Larbi, CEOAI agents are making decisions with no audit trail. XYO and Theta just built the fix - Markus Levin, Co-FounderThe internet can't tell humans from AI agents at scale - and World Foundation's DC Builder - Crypto Coin Show