‘Attention Is All You Need’, co-wrote by Illia Polosukhin in 2017, laid the foundation for arguably one of the most consequential tech breakthroughs in our recent history. 1 year later, Illia founded Near AI, which later became Near Protocol. They were visionaries ahead of their time and, although AI took several more years before becoming a viable product, the experience of scaling databases would later prove valuable and applicable in blockchain world. As a result, Near Protocol aims to become the infrastructure layer for AI apps and the agentic economy. In order to achieve this, scaling was paramount, thus Near is one of the first blockchains to implement execution layer sharding, asynchronous execution and stateless validation, which brought the finality time down to 1.2 seconds, with a block time of 0.6 seconds.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Bowen’s background
• Near’s pivot from AI to blockchains
• The role of Near One
• Near’s tech stack upgrades
• Optimizing network architecture
• Stateless validation & block propagation
• Sharding & asynchronous execution
• Message passing between shards & shard ‘equality’
• Challenges of implementing stateless validation
• Applications benefiting from Near’s finality speed
• Intent-based infrastructure
• AI use cases on Near
• Expanding Near’s ecosystem
• Development challenges
• Near’s vision and goals

Episode links:

• Bowen Wang on X
• Near One
• Near on X

Sponsors:

• Gnosis: Gnosis builds decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem, since 2015. This year marks the launch of Gnosis Pay— the world's first Decentralized Payment Network. Get started today at - gnosis.io
• Chorus One: one of the largest node operators worldwide, trusted by 175,000+ accounts across more than 60 networks, Chorus One combines institutional-grade security with the highest yields at - chorus.one

This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst.