The Smart Economy Podcast: Real-World Blockchain Applications with Crypto, DeFi, NFTs, and DAOs

There are genuine technical ideas buried in the episode—agent harnesses as operating systems with kernel layers, property-specific formal verification, PII-scrubbing before frontier model routing—but significant airtime is burned on Twitter handles, science fiction nostalgia, and generic AI enthusiasm that adds nothing for a B2B operator.

“to train these models you need to, we're training them on 15 trillion tokens, right? Like this is you know, like people, I was doing these calculations by the age of like 13 or 15, you've seen maybe like 80 million tokens in the language”

“you need to run 16 agents sometimes in parallel to get one of them to solve a problem, right? Just like it's so not robust”

The agent-harness-as-OS framing and the property-specific transactional formal verification angle are genuinely fresh, but much of the episode recycles well-worn blockchain-AI convergence narratives (chain abstraction, blockchain in the background, agents onboarding the next billion users) that have circulated in this space for years.

“Agents will be your interface to use blockchain and you may not even know you're using blockchain.”

“I did a B test. I did do a job on Agent Marketplace with an agent and on Fiverr with a human. Human was like 10 times slower and 3 times more expensive and asked me for more money”

Illia Polosukhin is a genuine founder-practitioner who built a data-labeling operation predating Scale AI, co-founded a major L1, and is actively developing a production agent framework—he speaks from real operational experience rather than thought-leadership abstraction, though the conversation doesn't extract his deepest expertise.

“when we were building near AI originally in 2017, we ended up building our own, you can call it Scale AI, right? We had students around the world who were doing data labeling kind of data contribution, and we had challenge paying them”

“Near Crowd is actually a data labeling platform that launched, I think in 2021 on near. Right. So we've had AI coordination and payments network on near since 2021”

The episode has a meaningful cluster of concrete data—$18B in intent volume with $5B since February, 16-agent parallel runs for robustness, 15 trillion training tokens vs ~80 million human-lifetime tokens, a 10x speed and 3x cost advantage over Fiverr—but many product and security claims remain hand-wavy without timelines, user counts, or revenue figures.

“the number that, that, that pops out in my research is 18 billion. There's been 18 billion in volume. That's been done 5 billion of that, 18 since February of this year”

“Human was like 10 times slower and 3 times more expensive and asked me for more money”

The host occasionally lands a substantive question—on bridge security attack surfaces, enterprise adoption shape, and onboarding mechanics—but opens with a Twitter handle origin story and a science fiction tangent, frequently compliments rather than probes, and never pushes back on a single claim the guest makes.

“Are you still carving time out to read and to keep up to date with science fiction and fantasy novels?”

“I want to know what the background story behind your Twitter handle is. I Black Dragon. What is that?”