Illia Polosukhin

Illia Polosukhin is an artificial intelligence researcher and software engineer, best known as the founder of NEAR Protocol. This layer-1 blockchain protocol allows the creation and execution of decentralized applications and smart contracts. He is also the CEO of the NEAR Foundation. Polosukhin holds a Master’s degree in Applied Math and Computer Science from the National Technical University “Kharkiv Polytechnic Institute”, where he also had his undergraduate studies.

 

Illia Polosukhin co-founded NEAR along with Alexander Skidanov. The original name was Near.ai. Illia Polosukhin was appointed as the CEO of the NEAR Foundation, a Switzerland-based non-profit organization supporting the NEAR Collective's mission. His role is to oversee the growth of the NEAR Open Web Ecosystem and guide the constellation of teams building on NEAR to work together towards that common vision.