Illia Polosukhin | NEAR Intents, Privacy & Quantum Security

Captions as YouTube publishes them, usually machine-generated, so product and people names can be misheard.

1. 0:00

   We need privacy. We need private AI. We need private money. We need to unite and really kind of connect not just web 3 but also like rest of the market. My name is Robbie and you're watching the rollup. And today I'm asking you to please subscribe, comment, like, and support our channel. We interview some of the best and brightest minds in digital assets, digital finance, and tokenization. We are doing this for you.

2. 0:24

   So, please sit back, relax, enjoy the show, and thank you so much for all your support. And now we're going to have Ilia, right? One of the I I I call him one of the founding fathers of AI. I think he truly is. Welcome to the show. Uh founding uncles.

3. 0:39

   Founding uncles of AI. He's an um he's got two kids. We have this book from uh Ellie about zero knowledge proofs. Alex on our team back there has your plaque uh with the attention is all that you need. That's going to go up in the office in in in New York City. Um, great event, big couple weeks for Near. Um, look, man, you're a humble guy, Ilia.

4. 1:00

   Um, you're you're very smart, very humble. How do you feel about the last like 6 to 8 weeks about Near? I feel like the whole market has woken up to Near. I mean, I've seen Near everywhere. People are calling it like Zcash is a Bitcoin of this bull market. Near is Ethereum. Like things are getting crazy quick. Humbly kind of like where do you see things now? Where do you see things going? Where are we at? Yeah, I mean you you know NA, right?

5. 1:23

   We've been building sort of like bull and bear through you know past like what 8 years uh 9 years if you include the AI before that. So uh we have a vision the world is changing and we need the decentralized technology we need privacy we need private AI we need private money we need to unite and really kind of connect not just web 3 but also like rest of the markets and so it's exciting to see more and more people joining.

6. 1:51

   It's obviously like has massive flywheel effects on products. Uh obviously, you know, market price is important because it gives everyone more resources, attracts more attention, and so it's exciting to kind of have all this uh action, and we're going to continue turning that into more products, more value.

7. 2:09

   Yeah, man. I mean, I think like the thing that has just become such such so apparent to the market and to me is that I mean, we're here at this Quantum Privacy Day with Quantis, right? they just launched. Their token is doing exceptionally well. Big congrats to them. Um, you know, the the near intense uh and the near.com experience, the black box of privacy of trading per swaps, bridging is just immaculate. It's

8. 2:35

   it's so good. Like it is just it's just like Grockbot is my AI harness. Near.com is my is my onchain harness, right? But extrapolating that, we talked about this last night over some wine in that there is a new world that you guys are getting into where it's like you are becoming the trading venue for the onchain speculative assets of this bull market.

9. 2:55

   Quantis being one and I talking about that other token pearl. I'm just curious how you think about near intense as this kind of broader chain abstraction vision that you once had. Now it's coming to fruition. Quant is a fantastic example.

10. 3:07

    There's no centralized exchange listings. You can only buy it on safe trade, but it's it's on near intent. It's on near.com. I was swapping into it this morning and last night. It's easy as hell and there's good liquidity. It happened so fast. Just like talk to us about what that vision is for Near Intense and and Near.com to bootstrap, I guess, the high quality speculative assets of this next era of this industry.

11. 3:28

    Yeah, I mean so Near Intense kind of the broadest form of vision, right, is like it's a market of markets, right? It's effectively this universal aggregator of anyone wanting to trade anything anywhere and being able to do it through kind of like finding the best counterparty to do it, right? And I'm not talking about just crypto. I'm not talking about just physical like digital assets. You know, if you want to order a

12. 3:51

    room in a hotel, if you want to, you know, build a base on Mars, right, there's going to be a counterparty that will be willing to do that, right? You know, Elon Musk is like, "Okay, cool. I'll do it for, you know, $2 trillion, right?" So that's a that's a broadest form of vision right and we kind of started with like okay chain abstraction is like really first problem that I mean we've been in crypto for a while this is like the most painful thing you can imagine right then now we just added

13. 4:15

    stocks right so now you're aggregating actually not just crypto venues you actually now have NASDAQ and New York stock exchange and we're going to be adding more venues as well so whenever you're sending an intent and you're saying hey I want to you know load up on let's say sovereign right the solvers can be like cool I'll buy it on NASDAQ.

14. 4:33

    I'll tokenize it and then bring it to your wallet. Right? So, you don't actually need to have immediate onchain exchange available. You can actually do this in real time. Similarly, you know, Quantis or other assets, maybe you don't have immediate liquidity now, but as you're creating this demand, right, more and more solvers who may be taking different position, different approach to trading can come in online and start

15. 4:54

    providing this liquidity, right? So you're kind of opening up more and more different options of how there's different venues the strategies can be aggregated in one place and then next step is yeah going full on you know natural language intent you know build me uh you know new skyscraper in New York right and it's like okay cool you know sub subcontracted to some sub agents who need to buy you know the whatever the height credits and whatnot

16. 5:20

    get the land etc right but like you can start seeing kind of this is like truly market of markets that you know aggregates any type of kind of activity trading but also just like generally willing reality into uh into real like willing things into reality.

17. 5:36

    I I think more and more people and agents are starting to realize this vision. I mean Belgi was just walking outside the hall. You know there's some very special people that you've been able to bring together with Near. How have you been able to coordinate so much intellectual capital so much you know physical capital labor agentic and human? How have you been able to structure near in such a way that it's

18. 5:58

    become this shelling point for for so much uh value? I mean there's been a few things. One is uh especially kind of coming as layer 1, right? I always felt it's been really like kind of misaligned this zero sum game of layer ones, right? Where like everybody was like, oh, you know, you should build on me, you should build on me. So really removing that kind of mindset and kind of becoming like okay well the more we work together with other layer ones with other blockchains

19. 6:26

    with other apps with other kind of protocols the better we get together right and so kind of really creating this as kind of a okay this is a universal liquidity layer let's actually get on it everyone and then on the other side obviously you know partnering with you guys partnering with more uh kind of folks across the ecosystem who can actually spread the message I think that's been historically one of the biggest new challenges right we've been doing a lot tech. We've been building a lot of uh kind of products,

20. 6:52

    but like how do we get this in front of more people? I mean, you guys launched your own effective like lending and cooking. I was talking to Stan backstage by the way, side note, uh about getting a engineer.com. So, I think that's a very logical next step or you know, I mean, you know, you have some vaults on there, but the because where we're going is like take my hyperlid position on.com, put it into a borrow against it so I

21. 7:14

    don't have to sell, etc., etc., etc. I got stocks on your.com, put into mave, borrow against my stocks, lever up. Yeah. So, I mean, or or just get cash and have to pay taxes, but I I will uh which is levering up. I I will I will connect you to Stan. I'm sure you guys are already talking, but um Quantum Justin Drake puts out a post, and I know we have like one or two more minutes. I think we're just a bit of a ton on time here. Justin Drake puts out

22. 7:36

    a post saying that you we need to prepare to go bunker mode. Uh Near.com or Near Protocol or Near responds, Near's got X, Y, and Z that is ready for this. Why is near ready for quantum? What does that mean? What is bunk is near a bunker? Like are you building bunkers? It's building a bunker first. Okay.

23. 7:54

    I just want to add one layer of this and we don't have I mean you know we talked about the market a little bit but without the prices in particular everything is read today based on this perceived threat. Yeah. Just because of Justin.

24. 8:06

    Not just because just I think I Vitalic just tweeted it's not helping. So look, the one thing is that near seems like it's diverging from everything else potentially because of this perceived quantum security whereas everything else is this perceived quantum vulnerability.

25. 8:21

    I mean maybe men but how I mean just maybe you can just illustrate like what is the reality of like why this diversion seems to be happening. Yeah. So I mean on a quantum specifically right there's like a few things. One is we've designed near with actually quantum in mind in 2018. We're like, "Hey, look, quantum computers will come at some point. Cryptography will change. We want to be ready to adjust

26. 8:45

    and update to whatever cryptography we need. And so, near accounts have a very kind of specific account model which allows you to rotate keys, to add keys, to have multiple keys like to and use different cryptography." And specifically, I literally wrote that code. It takes effectively like 200 lines of code to add a new cryptographic curve, right? And so earlier this year when

27. 9:08

    kind of the like the new algorithm on sol effectively you know recovering private key from a public key uh kind of started dropping we're like okay it's time to start actually shipping postquantum there's now standardized uh implementations as well and so we launched the first effectively delithium which is a mdsa cryptographic curve on near it went mainnet I think uh July and so you can anyone individually right now

28. 9:33

    can effectively update their account without moving any assets without needing to like you know withdraw from vaults, pay taxes, do any of this thing, right? You can literally just update the keys to be postquantum right now like on Meteor wallet it's like literally one button right so that is the massive change because you know the alternative is you need to bunker mode you need to like figure out a new way to derive keys you need to manage everything like it it

29. 9:59

    requires a lot of extra sophistication to do that and so that's a step one we have a whole like multiple steps program to add more and more other uh systems as well as well as other cryptography for people who want to use uh different [clears throat] But MLDDSA right now for for clarity that's the one that's been used across the whole internet like the Chrome browser that you use right now they already updated to it. This is

30. 10:20

    effectly a standard in the real world and near has this and so near we use this for cryptography and so you're saying that going to Near and putting your assets on Near is at least as good if not better as migrating your keys and going bunker mode. Uh so you you what you can do with factor is like you can have your near account uh with the postquantum uh cryptography holding it and the near account can then hold ass hold assets on Ethereum, Bitcoin and

31. 10:51

    other and you don't need to worry about it. We will we will need to like deal with all of them. Yeah. If you guys get in trouble, aren't I getting in trouble if you know what I Like if my assets are on Ethereum through Near and something happens to Ethereum, it's not like you guys are going to help me.

32. 11:06

    Yeah. I mean, if if if something happens to Ethereum, but you know, you don't need to worry like if you're holding it through Near, our infrastructure teams are going to take care of this, right? And so we going to black dragon mode and as as you know, we're building a lot of systems both on like cryptography on smart contracts and on proactive analysis with shield to actually detect when things are happening, right? So like our point is like look, you can hold things through like near.com. Yeah,

33. 11:31

    you can hold all this assets, you can trade, you can be private as well, which by the way hides your public key. There's nothing to derive even I mean even for non postquantum but for postquantum too and now then we can go and work with all those chains like we just had a podcast with Justin grilling him on cryptography making and kind of what they're going to use. So we actually make sure that we secure everybody's assets on as well.

34. 11:54

    Yeah, I thanks for your time man. Great event. Uh thanks for everything. It's been a pleasure and uh let's keep let's keep growing, man. It's this is just the beginning. So,