Illia is a Co-Founder of NEAR Protocol, a fully sharded, proof-of-stake, Layer 1 blockchain. NEAR has raised over $500 million and is widely considered one of the most promising projects in the blockchain space. Prior to NEAR, Illia managed a team of Deep Learning and Natural Language Understanding Researchers at Google Research where he worked on building TensorFlow. Follow Illia on Twitter @ilblackdragon.
[2:18] - How an early interest in computer programming led Illia down a path towards artificial intelligence and blockchains
[16:45] - Existing blockchain issues that led to the creation of the NEAR Protocol
[19:52] - NEAR’s focus on scalability and usability for long-term adoption
[26:00] - Why Illia views sharding as the superior strategy to scale blockchains
[34:47] - NEAR’s approach to encourage adoption of its tech stack
[47:20] - Governance considerations for NEAR’s decentralized ecosystem
[55:10] - The coming convergence of blockchain and artificial intelligence
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