On today's episode of Empire, Jason Yanowitz and Santiago Roel Santos are joined by Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of the Near. Near is one of the fastest-growing layer-one blockchains that uniquely focuses on the user and developer experience. Illia believes Near's innovative culture, simplicity and dynamic scalability will onboard the next 1B users to crypto.

Don't miss this discussion on Near's roadmap, scalability solutions, the layer-one landscape, Ukraine and more. This podcast was recorded the day before NEAR announced their latest $350M raise led by Tiger Capital; just 3 months after raising $150M from Three Arrows Capital.

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Empire is brought to you by Blockworks, a financial media brand delivering breaking news and premium insights about digital assets to millions of investors. For more content like Empire, visit http://blockworks.co/podcasts

Follow me and Santiago on Twitter, @JasonYanowitz and @santiagoroel; let us know what you thought of the show!

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(00:00) Introduction

(01:00) Near's Inspiration

(06:35) Ethereum's Scaling Challenge

(09:48) Scalability Tradeoff

(15:00) Centralization

(16:51) Enabling Innovation

(24:03) Blockchains As Cities

(27:18) Bitmex Ad

(28:34) Sharding

(32:35) Coordination Problem

(37:27) Rollup Complexity

(40:13) Solana and Avalanche

(43:41) Composability

(46:33) Low Switching Costs

(48:38) Multichain and Bridges

(52:59) Open Source Competition

(56:03) Ukraine