SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. – For years, the crypto industry has been searching for its next watershed moment – something on the scale of the DeFi summer or the NFT boom. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence has quietly become integrated into daily life. Developers use ChatGPT as a co-pilot. Consumers are relying on AI assistants to write emails, plan travel, and increasingly manage workflows. Crypto, by comparison, still seems infrastructural.
Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of NEAR, believes the divide is about to collapse – but not in the way many expect.
“Blockchain users will be AI agents,” Polosukhin said in an interview. “AI will be on the front end, and blockchain will be on the back end.”
Its framing runs counter to much of crypto’s recent experimentation with AI, which has largely focused on speculative tokens, memecoins, and agent-themed trading bots. Instead, Polosukhin argues that AI will become the main interface layer for everything online, including crypto, abstracting away from wallets, explorers and transaction hashes.
“The goal is to make your AI hide the entire blockchain,” he said. “The fact that we have [blockchain] explorers is indeed a failure, because we don’t abstract the technology.
From this point of view, blockchain is not disappearing, it is going backwards. AI agents interact directly with protocols, executing payments, managing assets, coordinating services, and even voting in governance systems. Humans, on the other hand, interact with AI.
“AI is the front end, not just for blockchain, but for everything,” Polosukhin said. “In a few years it will just be AI, like the operating system.”
This shift, he argues, could explain why crypto has not experienced an “AI moment” comparable to the consumer explosion of generative tools. “Blockchain is inherently financial,” he said. “It will be limited to finance, but everything we do in our life is finance.”
Rather than competing with AI platforms, crypto’s role could be to provide neutral financial rails underneath: settlement, ownership, verifiability, and programmable incentives.
Nonetheless, Polosukhin is critical of how the industry has approached both AI and governance so far – comments that come just days after Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin proposed “AI stewards” to help reinvent DAO governance.
“In blockchain, we propose technical solutions before asking ourselves: what is the heart of the problem? he said.
He cites decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs, as an example. “DAOs failed spectacularly because they were limitless and weren’t really designed to solve any problem,” he said, arguing that governance tools, including AI-assisted voting agents, only make sense if they are tied to clearly defined economic or coordination needs.
Another sticking point between the AI and crypto communities is culture. “Memecoins are ruining [the industry’s] reputation,” Polosukhin said, arguing that widespread speculation and scams have alienated serious AI researchers. “AI people are effectively banning crypto because of memecoins.”
However, longer-term convergence may be less about token launches and more about infrastructure. As AI systems increasingly act on behalf of users, such as paying bills, hiring services, allocating capital, they will require reliable execution, privacy, and programmable financial coordination.
“Blockchain is about neutral markets and neutral infrastructure,” Polosukhin said.
If AI becomes the operating system of the Internet, the future of crypto may lie not in being the application opened by users, but in becoming the invisible settlement layer on which their AI agents quietly depend.
Read more: NEAR launches Near.com super app, touting AI capabilities and confidential transactions
