$NEAR
Close the doors, turn on the lights, let’s fire it up. Every great build starts with a dream team. And the founders of NEAR aren’t weekend mechanics. They’re full-fledged engineers with résumés powerful enough to light up an entire data center.
Ilya Polosukhin, a former Google researcher and AI scientist, co-author of the 2017 paper Attention is All You Need. That paper didn’t just make waves—it sparked the large language model revolution that became the foundation of GPT. Ilya doesn’t just talk about innovation; he helped invent the playbook itself.
Alexander Skidnov, a Microsoft alum, competitive programming prodigy, and the very first engineer at MemSQL (later SingleStore). He designed the distributed system architecture that keeps Wall Street databases humming at impossible speeds. This guy doesn’t fix engines; he designs the highways they run on.
In 2017, the two of them launched NEAR.AI, a project to teach machines how to code. They tried paying contributors via Ethereum, but the engine seized. Gas fees skyrocketed, performance collapsed, and the dream hit a wall. What they did next was what real builders do: they rebuilt everything from scratch.
By 2018, NEAR Protocol was born—a blockchain engineered for speed, designed for developers, and built to scale to billions of users.
Funding and Partnerships:
They didn’t come with empty pockets; they raised half a billion dollars from top investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Tiger Global, Jump, Pantera, and others. They also brought in Google Cloud and Alibaba Cloud as partners for enterprise-grade infrastructure. This isn’t a garage project—it’s Formula One-level engineering, backed by Silicon Valley capital and world-class support.
