NEAR’s New Token Utility and AI Economy | Illia Polosukhin

What if staking a token could keep an AI agent thinking? NEAR cofounder Illia Polosukhin joins David to explain NEAR’s new staking-powered inference model, where yield funds access to confidential and verifiable AI. They unpack how NEAR AI Cloud, IronClaw, Intents, and the NEAR token fit into one integrated economy for autonomous agents, why AI outputs may need cryptographic proof when money is at stake, and how GPU compute could become a liquid global market.

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TIMESTAMPS

0:00 Private, Verifiable AI
4:57 Why AI Outputs Need Proof
9:13 From Staking Yield to Inference
16:16 NEAR’s Integrated AI Stack
20:01 NEAR as AI Money
24:27 Autonomous Businesses
28:51 Partners and Real-World Uses
33:26 What NEAR Ships Next
38:01 Where AI Value Accrues
40:56 The AI Operating System
48:07 Turning Compute Into a Market
51:48 Closing Thoughts

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RESOURCES

Illia Polosukhin
https://x.com/j0hnwang

Near revenue
https://revenue.near.org/

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