Illia Polosukhin, Founder & CEO of NEAR Protocol, is this week’s guest on Searching for Mana. Following on from the brilliant earlier episode with Marieke Flamant, Lloyd gets to the bottom of building a company sitting at the forefront of this potential paradigm shift to web3.

Lloyd and Illia guide us through the technical intricacies of the platform, the wider NEAR ecosystem, building a leading developer community and bringing mass user adoption to blockchain, impacting the future of work, and Illia’s own journey from Ukraine to Silicon Valley and now to Lisbon.

Developing a fascination with programming from a young age and becoming one of the top coders in Ukraine, Illia represents one of the most informed individuals on AI, having worked closely on Tensorflow prior to pivoting from one of the Big 4, and into his own entrepreneurial journey with NEAR.

In an enthralling conversation that spans the deeply technical discussion of DAOs, the NEAR platform and its similarities with Linux, with ideas around entrepreneurship, thought leadership and psychology, this episode is not to be missed.

On top of all of this, Illia is also at the forefront of Unchain Fund - an initiative leveraging blockchain and crypto to get money into the hands of those who desperately need it in the ongoing Ukraine war, which raised over $1 million within 24 hours. Links to Illia’s charity pages are below:

Donate: https://unchain.fund/#donate

Instagram with stories: https://www.instagram.com/unchain_fund/

[ 0:00 - 3:50 ] An intro to NEAR

[ 3:50 - 10:10 ] Running a Layer 1 blockchain platform

[ 10:10 - 16:04 ] How many winners will there be in web3

[ 16:04 - 19:54 ] Incentivising cross-chain communication

[ 19:54 - 24:07 ] Sweatcoin and onboarding users onto NEAR

[ 24:07 - 25:39 ] Illia’s Mana

[ 25:39 - 30:19 ] A winning mentality and the cruciality of communication

[ 30:19 - 34:39 ] Artificial Intelligence - friend or foe?

[ 34:39 - 39:07 ] Illia’s origin story and SciFi writings

[ 39:07 - 44:28 ] Diving deeper into code

[ 44:28 - 49:22 ] The future of education & universities

[ 49:22 - 58:21 ] Working at Google and Entrepreneurship

[ 58:21 - 1:02:41 ] Key skill-sets in web3

[ 1:02:41 - 1:09:18 ] DAOs and the future of NEAR

[ 1:09:18 - 1:16:05 ] The Ukraine war and the future of disaster relief