SAN FRANCISCO, CA – For years, the crypto industry has searched for its next breakout moment — something on the scale of DeFi summer or the NFT boom. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence has quietly embedded itself into daily life. Developers use ChatGPT as a co-pilot. Consumers rely on AI assistants to draft emails, plan travel, and increasingly manage workflows. Crypto, by comparison, still feels infrastructural.

Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of NEAR, believes that divide is about to collapse — 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 against much of crypto’s…