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Building the Future of User-Owned Al and Open Web with NEAR Protocol
Recorded: July 18, 2025 Duration: 1:00:40Space Recording
Short Summary
In a groundbreaking discussion, leaders from the Nier protocol unveil their vision for a decentralized future, focusing on the evolution of blockchain technology, user-owned AI, and the ambitious goal of achieving a million transactions per second. As they explore the shift towards open-source AI and the importance of user agency, the conversation highlights Nier's strategic positioning to onboard the next billion users into the crypto ecosystem.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And GM. Hi, hioher everybody. Alex, I think we're waiting for Bowen.
Yeah, I was a little bit worried that something wrong is on my side, so I don't hear anything.
My ex has been a bit weird, too.
All of the acts are a little bit weird, yeah.
Well, as we know, it's a super intelligence
complete problem to solve the AV.
So that's what we're going to discuss today. Absolutely.
Looking forward. Thank you. I guess our host is also having trouble and Bowen is having trouble.
We can do it.
We can do it in between you and me.
I can host you.
Yeah.
If you want.
We can start.
I think Paul is here now. Yeah, yeah guys can you hear me well now yes yes finally thank god
sorry uh because i was speaking for the whole six minutes and then i realized that you cannot hear me
sorry for that uh twerking glitch we're still approving bowen as well meanwhile dear listeners
welcome back to cryptptic Talks,
where we explore the frontiers of decentralized web, the future of user-owned AI, and bold
builders rewriting the internet's operating system. I'm your usual host, Polly Speaks,
managing relations and PR at Cryptic, and today's episode is nothing short of monumental. We're diving deep into the
evolution of Nier protocol finally. I was hunting guys for almost than half a year. It's a layer one
blockchain that's not just scalable but a developer friendly but now emerging as a foundational layer
for user-owned AI and the open web. We are joined by three of the most influential mind-shaping division
and i think that we're still waiting for bowen um i'm in touch with him through telegram and i hope
that we're gonna approve him soon but meanwhile um ilia co-founder of near and one of the earliest
voices connecting blockchain with open source ai and alex ceo of aurora who is leading
the charge in ethereum compatibility and bridging ecosystems for a seamless web3 experience guys
feel free to unmute yourself yeah you can be first uh give us some heads up on your background and
your mood of course okay thank you um great to be here. Thanks for inviting us. My background is in AI machine learning. I was a data scientist and AI researcher, worked at Google, led a team doing question answering, machine translation, understanding of language. And I'm one of the co-authors on a paper,
Attention is All You Need, which introduced transformers,
which is T in GPT.
And so when kind of that work was concluded,
I saw an opportunity to start an AI company.
And so I left and started near AI
with my co-founder, Alex Kydanov.
And that was a bit too early for the AI.
There was no enough compute,
not enough hardware available
to do what we wanted to do.
But we ended up actually building
a decentralized network of crowdsourcers,
of students around the world doing small tasks for us and we had the
trouble paying them and so we got into blockchain to really solve our problem how do we coordinate
a bunch of people to collect data for the machine learning for ai so very much rooted in this, focused on building scalable, easy to use, easy to build on
network as near protocol, and been coming back to AI in the past couple of years to really enable
and make sure that we have user-owned AI and AI is on our side, on community side, not
kind of gets observed by, you know, a single individual
or a single company. Well, that looks like a heavy background. You were working in Google
and also you're a co-author of Paper Attention All You Need. That's very huge. I think that we
can even host a solo episode to discuss your thoughts on the book
where I need to Google it, sorry, but maybe it can be something interesting. Very compelling
background. And Alex, maybe you can also share with you your background and updates on your mood.
with you your background and updates on your mood.
Yeah, absolutely. I'm also a techie, also from the same
country, the same city and the same school as Evia.
I joined him not from the very beginning of the Nier protocol but in 2020 and
already for five years contributing into this
protocol. I founded Aurora, which is the EVM
compatible solution on top of Nier, which is the EVM compatible solution on top of Nier,
which is until now it works.
And you can think of Aurora as an infrastructure provider
that is similar to the L2.
Alex, I kind of lost you. Ilya, can you hear Alex?
Nope.
That's bad.
Alex, if you can hear us, please, maybe you can also rejoin for now.
And we're still approving bowen uh we sent
invites several times but you never know what is going to happen with theory today
alex please no i don't want to lose you here Let's wait.
It seems like we have bone.
Yeah, we have bone, finally.
Can you hear us?
Yes.
Can you hear me?
Yes, yes, finally.
Thank God.
Maybe while we lost Alex Bowen,
you can give us some heads up on your background
and updates on your mood today.
Yes, great to be here.
I had some trouble joining the space.
Glad that worked out.
Yeah, I also joined here initially at the very beginning, even before the blockchain time.
I actually was also doing AI research at the time, and I saw this paper that Alex and
Ilya was working on about neural program synthesis which is like basically
code generation and yeah we got in touch with them and that's how I joined NIR initially even
before us doing blockchain stuff. Magnificent so I'm assuming you're also a tech mind here, driving the protocol's most transformative innovations.
And let's see if Alex is back here.
Try to unmute yourself, Alex.
Hello. Hello? I guess we still have some problems.
I don't know what is going on today with Twitter.
Maybe Elon Musk is trying to share some updates in tech stuff.
I don't know.
Alex, can you please try to rejoin?
Because we lost you at the middle of your speech about the background which
was very interesting and i want to and i want to hear the the full story here but meanwhile we're
doing this thank you for the introductions guys ilia bowen and the part of the introduction, Alex T. I'm on cloud nine, to be honest, to have you all with us today.
I was waiting for this space for a long time.
And dear listeners, in this conversation,
we unpack how NIR is evolving from infrastructure to intelligence,
how it's empowering the next billion users through innovations
like NIR Intense, and what it means to build
AI that is collectively owned, transparent and ethical.
We also going to explore the house of stake, a radically new model for on-chain governance
and discuss the rise of agent economies where crypto native AI agents could redefine commerce
itself.
So whether you are an AI researcher a developer a builder or just
deeply curious about the future of the internet you're going to want to listen to this one through
to the very end and meanwhile alex is rejoining i want to talk to you guys ilia bowen with the
first question what inspired the founding of Neurot Protocol, actually?
And how have your core principles evolved since launch?
The biggest inspiration was coming from a need we had.
So as we were building the AI system, we had need in more high quality training data.
And so we were engaging computer science students around the world where potentially, you know, a couple dollars can go a long way.
And so we had a lot of them contributing different pieces of data.
And so we had a lot of them contributing different pieces of data, and they all live in China, Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia.
And there's all kinds of challenges with sending money, and especially small amounts of money, to those countries.
Students in China don't have bank accounts.
They have WeChat Pay.
In Eastern Europe, in different countries, different payment solutions didn't work.
In Ukraine, you needed to sell half of your dollars in arrival.
So there's all kinds of strange challenges.
And so blockchain really initially for us was the solution to kind of programmable money,
a way to really kind of programmatically pay people in an easy way globally.
really kind of programmatically pay people in an easy way globally.
Now, at the time, right, this is 2018,
there was nothing that would actually satisfy our requirements, right?
Be cheap enough to kind of spend, you know, 15 cents,
be fast enough, be easy enough to use for users.
And so that's really what kind of inspired Nier Protocol is how do we build a blockchain
that can scale and never has challenges with capacity, kind of taking that Silicon Valley
mentality that, you know, everything should scale to whatever billions of users you can
actually attract.
It should be easy to use.
So blockchain shouldn't be in the forefront of the experience.
You know, the application should drive the experience and then blockchain should be abstracted.
So we call this chain abstraction.
And then on the developer side,
make sure developers can use all the best tools
they already know how to use.
So support JavaScript, support Python, support Rust,
be able to run arbitrary existing code that people want
instead of needing to reinvent the wheel
for every single functionality.
So that's really what kind of kicked off Nier Protocol.
Obviously there's a lot of work to make this,
simple statements to actually
work but the evolution i think of ownerships of sovereignty that's the path that we took and
um a big transitions is really this understanding of to me like self-sovereignty user ownership
right transition from kind of corporate mindset
where you kind of trying to create an empire
that will kind of gobble all the resources
to really create a system that can continue scaling
while participants are able to coordinate
and kind of have an ownership in the system itself.
So that's why kind of the overall vision for NIR is all people should control their assets,
data and power of choice.
And so we had kind of data, which obviously now very much overlaps with AI, but also power
of choice, which is, you know, everything from governance
to ability to choose which wallet or which, you know, whatever provider you want to use
without needing to, you know, go and call and cancel your time burner cable.
That's huge.
Such a ground and an origin story.
I mean, honestly, it makes so much sense in the inside. I love that that spark wasn't some black white paper epiphany in a coffee shop. It was just like, hey, we need better tech that actually works. ambition but sheer frustration with broken payment rails and tools that require phd to use except
the phd doesn't help because the wallets still won't sink and shout out to the students who were
contributing early on i think that what's wild is that back in 2019 programmable money still
sounded futuristic to most people like it had that sci-fi flavor now it's part of everyday
conversation in this space,
but you were already seeing that blockchain wasn't just a ledger.
It was a coordination engine,
something that could encode logic, not just balances.
That's a huge leap.
And I really appreciate that you said about usability
because let's be honest, back then using blockchain app
felt like, I don't know, assembling IKEA furniture with no instructions in a foreign language during an earthquake.
So NIR wasn't just about like building something powerful.
It was about building something people could actually touch without it biting back.
And now it is powerful.
That kind of empathy for the end user is so often missing in infrastructure
projects you like weren't just thinking about as engineers you're thinking as users as well
and that shift right there that's foundational i can see also that alex is here and uh maybe we
can touch the base uh again regarding the background part and also I know that
you're CEO Aurora so I would love to ask what inspired the founding of Aurora as
well yeah so clearly my background is in is in not a very good connection with
Twitter today but we got to the, the thinking was pretty straightforward.
So back four years ago, there was the idea that there is a bunch of people who actually
like blockchain and they want to use their own tools that are developed for the blockchain,
which is Solidity and also lots of other tools that are developed specifically for the Ethereum
ecosystem. And there was this idea that if we can enable these people to launch
their solutions on top of Nier, it will be really good. And that was what Aurora
was about. And this kind of Aurora mainnet chain that was launched, the VM
compatibility layer on top of near uh this is how
Aurora started but very soon we understood fundamental limitation of the evm it cannot
scale it was built uh back then when people were not thinking about the scalability of blockchain
Cecilia was thinking and uh uh but fundamentally evm won in terms of the won in terms of the adoption or the developer resources.
So there are already many things that are developed for EVM, and we need to scale it up somehow.
How we can scale it? Only through launching many EVMs.
That's the only way forward.
That's the only way forward.
That's why Aurora's architecture is dictated by this idea of the necessity of launching many EVMs.
That's why we were putting the ability to launch EVM network on top of our priority list. And we wanted to optimize for it,
and we were pushing towards the current situation
when we have this product that is called Aurora Cloud,
where anyone is able to launch their own EVM-compatible network
for free within only 30 seconds,
on top of the scalable infrastructure provided by the Nier blockchain.
This is the best solution that saves you tons of time and even more money
when you are the entrepreneur in the crypto vertical and you're willing to launch your own blockchain.
Now, the interesting thing that we figured out within this Aurora journey is that it's not only the infrastructure that is required for people, but also the connectivity to other ecosystems.
And that was the idea behind near-intents, and most probably we're going to touch base on the near intents a little bit later
yes we're definitely gonna touch uh that question about uh near intents though i love that uh evm
like that you said that evm wasn't scalable but it won in terms of adoption that's such a brutally
honest take and i think it's one that anyone building in VAT3 eventually has to come to peace with.
It's like, yes, it leaks, it cracks.
It's basically the duct tape minivan of smart contracts platform.
But hey, everyone knows how to drive it.
So here we are.
And what I really appreciate is that instead of trying to reinvent the wheel,
And what I really appreciate is that instead of trying to reinvent the wheel,
Aurora leaned into the reality and said,
all right, let's make this Miniman fly.
Four years ago, thinking about launching more apps on top of Nier
by embracing EVM compatibility, it wasn't just like smart, it was strategic.
And you didn't fight adoption, you optimized it.
It's a very work smarter not harder philosophy
like you didn't say let let's drag everyone kicking and screaming into a new party and you
said let's meet developers where they are and then blow the roof off the limitations they're stuck
with that's a real service to the ecosystem i love that that. And definitely we're going to reveal some more details later in this episode. Bowen though, maybe you can also share your, I would say, feelings and thoughts
in terms of contribution to NewYork Protocol as well and how have your core principles evolved evolved since since launch since you joined yeah so uh you know we started um developing
your protocol i think almost uh seven years ago now uh and as you said it's uh very different uh
back then compared to where we're today uh a lot of things we take for granted today uh were not
uh not really the case i remember we're trying I remember we're trying out
Ethereum development experience
and it's really, really difficult
to even understand how you get started
and various tools don't work.
And then you encounter this new language,
that solidity that you need to learn
and then also need to deal with EVM,
which is a bit strange for a regular developer.
And it's also about the experience that it offers to developers.
That's why when we build Nier, we think a lot about how to make it easy for both end
users and developers to interact with the chain. We have a lot of very useful features like
human readable account name, so you don't have to stare at a whole bunch of hex code trying to
understand whether that's your account or not. And we have this access key pattern that allows
front end to send transactions on user behalf, which is really, really convenient.
And also the very flexible account model, you know, account can have multiple access keys.
Access keys can be of different types.
And also a smart contract being able to return in languages people are familiar with,
not like, you know, using completely new language, but also using the WebAssembly runtime that makes things more efficient.
I think we definitely made a lot of right choices back then to not only make the blockchain scalable, have a high throughput, but also make it very easy for users and developers to interact with the blockchain.
and developers to interact with the blockchain.
Thank you, Bowen.
Like seven years, that's practically ancient history
in crypto years.
I mean, in dog years, it's like 50.
And in blockchain years, it's a miracle you're still standing,
let alone thriving.
So hats off to you for not just surviving the early cows,
but building something that's actually lasting.
So you're totally right, though.
People entering Web3 today do take a lot of things for granted.
It's easy to forget that back then,
just figuring out how to deploy a smart product
felt like solving a Rubik's cube,
blindfolded with
while someone was shouting gas fees at you and what stands out in what you're
saying is this idea of experience first that's not always common in layer one
protocols most were obsessed with the raw throughput TPS consensus wars but
near looked at the human side and you asked okay
how do we make this usable that's a radically empathic stance in a space filled with engineers
building for engineers and i love how you humbly say we made a lot of right choices because
yeah you definitely did near could have been like taking shortcuts but you
play the long game you optimize the evolution and for evolution uh not just hype cycles so kudos to
you to the team to everyone who uh contributing still for the ecosystem for staying curious staying
principled and building something that actually invites people in though another thing that i wanted to
ask you guys i'm interested what is near's vision for user-owned ai and how can blockchain play a
role in scaling and safeguarding open source ai ilia maybe we can start with you
you yeah i mean the there's effectively a few different pieces right one is how do we ensure
that kind of in the long term as we grow to depend more and more on ai it we delegate more and more
of our decisions to it as well as some of of the decisions right now delegated to middlemen will be done by AI,
this actually benefits you
and is kind of net positive for the user
and not extractive or even worse,
a big browser style where, you know,
somebody's watching you at all times
and also slightly manipulates you toward the direction
do they want and so there's a whole host of things that require to ensure that but that's
kind of what we call user-owned ai as a whole vision but it starts with really ensuring that
the ai itself the inference the agents the, the data, the memory, everything is private.
It's not leaked to third parties.
They're not misusing it in various ways.
And they also cannot run a variety of analytics
and spyware on top of this or just leak it accidentally, right?
Or if they get data breached.
So that's something that I think
the crypto space has been talking about
for, you know, decade or longer,
but there hasn't been really solutions to that.
Blockchain so far actually been more
of a transparency solution than a privacy
solution and so one of the core kind of innovations we're building on top of is recent advancements in
hardware kind of confidential computing mode and kind of using that and building on top of it to enable kind of performant private data, private memory,
and private AI. Now from there, we will need to make sure that we have AI models that are
truly kind of transparent and on the user side. Even if the model weights right now are released
by a company, first of all, there's no guarantee that company
is going to continue doing that.
Second is we actually don't know what data went into that training
of that model that creates potential manipulation.
There's this concept of sleeper agents where in training data
you can actually affect the outcome of the model under certain conditions.
And so this can be used for manipulation for cyber attacks and variety of other use cases.
And so making sure we have a way to actually train models in a fully auditable way and then
use them in audible and safe way, right? Where right now, again now again the models safety mode is effectively
applied on top and kind of decoupled from the model weights itself so all that
can be combined in a in the kind of one component that is enforced by the
blockchain access control and you and payments and incentives to ensure
that this is actually built on in the right way.
I hope so, I hope so.
And I think, yeah, you're right.
We're living in this wild new era
where we're delegating more and more decisions to AI
from what we watch to what we buy and soon maybe
even what we say but you nailed it no one wants a digital assistant that's secretly moonlighting
as big brothers unpaid uh intern the core idea you mentioned making sure memory the agent the
intelligence layer are private by default
that's honestly revolutionary because we're so used to these invisible trade-offs convenience
on that front end surveillance on the back end and nearest approach flips that it's like
sure you can have smart ai but it doesn't have to come with spyware included and the scary part is as you said we still don't
really have a full privacy solution for that and i'm glad that you're taking initiative here most
of today's ai is built or to extract and not protect it's like training a loyal dog and then
handling the leash to someone who sells your secrets to advertisers. So I think it's really refreshing to hear a team thinking this far ahead,
not just like scale, but alignment too,
because building user-owned AI isn't just about giving people access,
it's about giving them agency.
So yeah, thank you for drawing that line in the sand
and doing the hard work to make privacy a right not premium add-on
Alex maybe you have thoughts on this question as well what would like you
what would you like to add here yeah so first of all I'm fully aligned with with
what the EA is saying I don't want to contribute into living in this centralized dystopian world with a single entity or government
controlling everything the whole ideas of private money decentralization you know
these ideas that power the creation of the cryptocurrencies and the blockchain technology
they are very very dear to my heart.
And I think this similar decentralization effort needs to happen in the AI.
I would like to add only one particular thing that is, from my point of view, is very, very important.
The era of AI agents, it seems like an inevitable thing,
something that we're going to experience very soon,
and we're going to rely on the AI agents a lot.
And in order for these agents to be actionable,
they not only need to call some kind of APIs
and being able to take a look into your emails.
But also they need to be able to pay to other entities, whether it is the agents itself or
some kind of services. I want to tell to my agent, to my personal assistant agent, that I just want to eat something.
And it is going to figure it out,
order me the food that I like, and just pay for it.
And I even don't need to think about it.
That's kind of the user experience
that I would expect from this new era to deliver to me.
And the payments, we have here a fork in the road.
We either are going to work with the existing payment solutions
like Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, Swift, and other centralized players
who are completely controlling the things.
And honestly, they're working very, very slow.
Or we can power this new world, this new agentic world,
with something that is much more performant
and is not made specifically with the idea of knowing your customer
because you cannot apply KYC to a computer program. made specifically with the idea of knowing your customer
because you cannot apply KYC to a computer program.
You cannot make an agent pass KYC.
And this is the blockchain.
So from that standpoint, in this new world,
when we're going to have millions of agents,
we have a shot.
The blockchain vertical has a shot to deliver
this payments use case to this new world and in order to do this in order to succeed here we need
to have a very very scalable solution we cannot just execute whatever seven transactions per second that is delivered to us by some OG blockchains.
We need to be targeting complicated, not just token transfers, not just the base token transfers,
but complicated escrow style payment transactions at scale.
at scale.
And by saying at scale,
I mean we need to be
ideally an order of magnitude
higher in throughput
than whatever centralized solutions
are proposing to us right now.
And their throughput is
50,000 transactions per second.
We need to scale
blockchains to
half a million, a million transactions
per second second complicated transactions
and this is something that will be able to us to give this uh uh payment use case payment trail
use case and that's the one of the core benefits of the near protocol protocol, something that NIR has been developed for a very, very long time.
The scalability is instilled inside of the DNA of the NIR protocol, and everything that
we are working on is supporting this particular use case, as well as many other
use cases that require scalability.
that require scalability.
Thank you, Alex.
I think that, yes, first of all,
I wanted to highlight the beginning of your answer.
Centralized dystopia where AI is controlled
by five megacores and your digital assistant
starts recommending only products
from its parent company, HeartPass,
and that's not the future we signed up for
and thankfully near is clearly trying to steer us towards something more
empowering and I love the simplicity of the example I want to eat like that yeah
you just tell to your agent I want to eat and you're not thinking about it
anymore subtle critical point they I becomes an extension of you, but only
if it's working for you and not someone else. Honestly, also the idea of AI agents being other
entities sounds futuristic a little bit for me, at least for now, but it's already on the horizon
and that's good. Picture your fridge ordering groceries from a dow round food
corporation or your ai assistant tipping another agent for helping it negotiate the best travel
um internet area wild right but that's where things are headed and i really respect that
you're thinking here is not just technical it's ethical as well you're saying like let's build a
world where ai is owned accountable and aligned with humans that's a whole different conversation thinking here is not just technical it's ethical as well you're saying like let's build a world
where ai is owned accountable and aligned with humans that's a whole different conversation
than just faster interface speeds and yeah let's let's build agents that can feed us and of course
through more complicated escrow transactions at scale too and And they should be, that this should be huge too.
Bowen, maybe you can also add your thoughts
to the initial question regarding vision
for user-owned AI.
How can blockchain play a role
in the scaling and safeguarding open source AI?
Though I think that Alex kind of touched already
this AI- driven commerce and
agent economies, so feel free to express some thoughts regarding this topic too.
Yeah, so I think both Alex and Elia already said very well about various aspects of user-owned AI.
I think maybe like the meta point is that if we
think about the history of internet, it's basically taken for granted that internet is open, but it
didn't have to end up this way. There was actually an initiative from Microsoft in the mid-90s to
build this proprietary internet called the information highway. And if they succeeded,
then I think we likely would end up in a very different world today where all the internet
infrastructure is controlled by one company. And that clearly would not have been ideal.
But with AI, I think we are heading towards that direction, which work towards an alternative where
open source AI actually wins. And this is where the blockchain can act very well as a coordination
layer between not just people contributing data, making them transparent,
but also open source model fine tuning and potentially even model training. And you can
have people that actually train, fine tune the models and contribute back and then monetize on
them and then while open sourcing like the way they're doing that so that you can
have this momentum that keeps building
and have more and more people joining
this effort because there will be
people with different ideas that can,
you know, fine tune their model in
different ways or like, you know,
propose different training mechanism
and so on and so forth.
So if we actually can make that happen
uh i think yeah we will have a chance of um making open source ai the future
definitely i think that we already on the right path here to be honest because um yeah we're kind of taking it for granted but there's
still a time for us to fight towards the right direction where open source ai can win i agree
with you here though guys i promised you that we can talk a little bit more about um unique
positioning and architecture of near as well including near intense so my question probably it's
gonna be last question to be honest because I thought that we can go
through more torturing ones but there's gonna be probably the final one because
we have like 15 minutes left on air but you can express more ideas of course too
so the question is how does near's architecture including near intense
uniquely position it to onboard the next billion users
yeah i mean i can talk first about the underlying architecture and then maybe alex can talk more
specific about uh near intense um so near has a has a sharded approach since the very beginning.
So basically instead of building,
having everything act in a single shard
like a lot of other blockchains do,
like Ethereum and a lot of others,
NIR actually scale by having those homogeneous shards.
So you can think of each shard as its own blockchain.
And then you actually, by having more shards, you actually
spread the state and transaction processing along those shards.
So basically, the more shards you have, the more throughput you will have as well.
And this is, we think this is like the fundamental solution to the scaling problem of blockchain, because
with any kind of single sharding system, we eventually run into some problem of a limit
of what a single machine can do.
And if you actually want to scale to the level of billions of users, then you have to shard
your blockchain.
And we've been building on that journey for a number of years now.
And now the nearest fully sharded both the state as well as transaction processing.
And currently we have eight shards on mainnet and we plan to scale that to many more shards
in the next several months and years.
And also we hope to get to 1 million transactions per second by scaling to more shards and also
optimizing the single shard performance.
And it's also not just about sharding the whole system per se, right?
Because even if the entire blockchain is sharded, you still have a problem of the throughput being limited
by a single smart contract.
If that smart contract goes very large,
then it's limited by the throughput of one single shard.
So we're concurrently developing this sharded smart contract
feature on the protocol level where it allows you
to actually shard a smart contract as
well.
So basically instead of a smart contract living on one shard, it will basically live on all
shards and it will basically maximally leverage the sharding feature of Nier and get the throughput
benefit as well.
And we think this is how, for example,
some very popular and important apps like Near Intense
can get to millions of users as well.
Continuing on this thing, on the architecture design here,
Raoul, I would like to mention also
several additional great pieces of infrastructure
that is available on top of NIR. One of them being the solution that is called Chain Signatures.
And what this thing allows us to do is that NIR accounts and NIR smart contracts are able to have
private keys. These keys are stored in a multipointing computation
network that is run by some of the NIR validators,
but it is going to be run by all of the NIR validators
eventually.
And what this thing allows us to do, and it actually
makes sure that the NIR smart contracts are able to
authenticate things, they are able to authenticate things.
They are able to sign messages.
And they are also able to actually send transactions to other blockchains,
which is a very funny, interesting spin.
Because now near smart contracts are able to hold crypto on other chains
and send payments on other chains,
which is a very interesting concept.
And this concept allows us to build a solution on top of it that we call the Omnibridge,
a solution that permissionlessly connects other blockchains to near blockchain.
And then on top of this Omnibridge, we're again in this kind of deposit and withdrawal service that allows any crypto to be non-custodially stored inside of the NIR accounts and NIR smart contracts.
any defy use case that is going to be implemented on near would automatically because of the omnibridge
and chain signatures would become a cross-chain defy use case if it is a lending protocol well
then you can use bitcoin and eth and soul and as of yesterday sui as collateral in this lending protocol and you can borrow stable coins xrp or dodge or zcash
also on the same protocol if we're talking about swapping engine then we can create an
rfq style system with extremely efficient swapping mechanism that is already implemented right here right now we are building additional use
cases including launch fads nft marketplace was launched uh just this week and there are much more
additional use cases that are all based on this great technologies and great architectural decisions that were made by the near team.
Yeah, that's how we are positioned to get the next billion users into the blockchain,
because these users are not going to think about the, you know, some small details about the
wallets that they have, complicated user experience and stuff like that.
The next billion users on the blockchain are the housewives, ordinary workers.
They just use their phones.
They even maybe not have a laptop or a computer
and they need something that feels extremely smooth
and straightforward.
And this is what we're building it near.
Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God my god first of all you said million transactions per second right
yes this is the target from that yeah oh jesus christ that's not just scaling that's
strapping a rocket to the blockchain and pointing it toward mass adoption i mean
we've gone from ethereum can handle crypto kitties to near saying hold my validator node
and the fact that you have been at this for over a decade uh bones at 11 years that's not just
experience guys it's battle tested wisdom so you didn't wake up one day and say hey let's do
sharding you leave the challenges and
bottlenecks the trial by fire that shaped today's architecture more shards means more throughput
yes but it's also about how near scales dynamically flexibly and without breaking a developer or user
experience like watching a highway expand automatically based on traffic i don't know
only here each new lane is a fully operational shard and now also bones that adding shared
shared smart contracts into the mix that's uh such an underrated evolution i think you're like
turning contracts into composable network wide services like plug and play models and cherry on top chain signatures innovation uh about which
alex told us uh letting near contracts actually sign messages interact with other chains and even
hold crypto across ecosystems that's no longer just interoperability that's blockchain diplomacy at
its finest and um omnibridge concept is incredibly powerful too uh you're not just connecting chains
you're enabling them to collaborate like intelligent uh agents that's the foundation
for a truly interconnected web3 what i see here Nier quietly becoming a glue layer to the open web
and you're not trying to replace other chains.
You're giving developers the tools to unify them.
And for onboarding the next billion users,
that's exactly the kind of architecture we need.
Fast, flexible, and frictionless as well.
So shards, shared contracts, chain signed, introvert.
Okay, Nier is not just uh scaling the tech it's scaling the experience in my point of view dear listeners if you agree with me if
please bombard out with their actions because that's in my opinion it's what's going to win
and by the way ilia if you want to add something feel free to do that. But I think that Bowen and Alex told us the whole story here.
Though, anyways, feel free to unmute yourself if you have some more thoughts.
No, I mean, they definitely covered a lot of the underlying stack.
I guess to mention the other component is the AI component and enabling autonomous agents as well as personal agents and assistants
to effectively provide this private experience that is
fully encompasses you, but is able to also leverage all of the
near intents and blockchain underneath.
Have all this really tying together into this holistic vision
of what we're building with NIR.
Magnificent.
I think that NIR is clearly thinking
about onboarding everyone,
including those who have no exposure
to blockchain at all.
And in that sense,
it's not just like building infrastructure,
it's building bridges to the future.
Guys, I think that we are out of our time sense it's not just like building infrastructure it's building bridges to the future guys um i
think that we are out of our time unfortunately but i would love to host more spaces with each
uh one of you solo spaces common twitter spaces very welcome it was incredible session i think
and we have some time left um left to share some personal thoughts as well
I would like first of all for first of all before final thoughts huge thanks to every speaker here
Ilya Bowen Alex for not just building the infrastructure of the open web but for doing
it with vision integrity and a commitment is that decentralization that scales with humanity and not just hardware.
Thank you so much.
I enjoyed the thoughts.
I got inspired.
I got curious to dive in more into the near.
I dropped a follow to everyone here and to, of course, the near protocol.
course, Nier Protocol. I'm trying to
I'm trying to comment some posts and updates every day.
comment some posts and updates
every day.
But for now, if you have some
final words for our listeners,
feel free to speak up.
Maybe you can go first.
I think we covered a lot.
Nier set out to
bring Indeed
blockchain for mass adoption.
And at the same time, with our roots in AI, we think AI is going to be the way you're going to be interacting with computing, is the way we're going to be effectively doing technologies going forward, like using technologies going forward.
And so that is how mass adoption will come.
And blockchain is really this underlying system that ensures user ownership,
trust, and verifiability.
And so all of those pieces really playing together and kind of near as unique to be thinking how to
bring all these things together in a cohesive way and give users experience while this is already
live um you know we have i think 47 48 million monthly active users we We have plenty of integrations on the Intense,
Chain Signature side with the rest of the Web3 ecosystem,
and a lot more AI things are coming in coming months.
I'm super excited for it.
Alex?
Yeah, I wanted to add one thing, right?
A little bit tangential to this, but to everything that we have been talking about today.
But still, something that I believe is very, very important.
Many people in crypto right now, they are in the trenches.
They want to earn money and all of this stuff.
But there is this saying, right?
Believe in something.
And everyone who has been listening to this case, to this space,
we're able to hear what we are believing at, we're believing in.
We do believe in a better future, in a decentralized future
when our thoughts are not controlled,
when we are able to have our own governance power,
our own ability to manage our assets
and stuff like that.
We really believe,
and this is what keeps us up all nights
and continue building things, contributing
into the wide NEO ecosystem and trying
to unite the blockchains together.
So if you're also sharing these beliefs, jump on board.
There are lots of different things that can be done
and can be built in the NEO ecosystem.
And we are welcoming everyone
to join. Thank you. Thank you so much Alex. Yeah guys I hope that you're taking notes here and
you really believe in the future of decentralization and in NIR and in Aurora as well.
Bowen your final thoughts for listeners?
Yeah, we have built a lot of great things in the past several years, scalable blockchains,
chain abstraction technology and so on. And we're really excited to move forward,
keep building those things, but also working towards open source AI and the future of superintelligence.
Awesome. Thank you, Bowen. Thank you, dear speakers. It was a wonderful time that we spent here together.
together i i as i already said i got very inspired to be honest and i think that final takeaway here
I, as I already said, I got very inspired, to be honest.
for listeners the future of web 3 isn't just about decentralizing finance it's about
decentralizing intelligence as well and it's about building systems where humans agents and
communities can all thrive in alignment and near protocol is positioning itself at the heart of
that movement if this conversation
sparked your imagination share it with your network drop a follow to official near county
accounts of all the speakers today share some comments and share with someone who also believe
in the web 3. the open web is coming and we're here to build it together. Thank you so much.
It was Pauli Speaks signing off and it was Cryptic Talks.
Stay curious, stay decentralized.
Have a good rest of the day, morning or evening.
Ciao, ciao. Thank you.
