SAN FRANCISCO, CA – For years, the cryptocurrency industry has searched for its next watershed moment, something on the scale of the DeFi summer or the NFT boom. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence has been quietly incorporated into daily life. The developers use ChatGPT as a co-pilot. Consumers increasingly rely on AI assistants to compose emails, plan trips, and manage workflows. By comparison, cryptocurrencies still seem infrastructural.
Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of NEAR, believes the division is about to collapse, but not in the way many expect.
“Blockchain users will be AI agents,” Polosukhin said in an interview. “AI will be on the front end and blockchain will be the back end.”
His framing runs counter to much of cryptocurrency’s recent experimentation with AI, which has largely focused on speculative tokens, memecoins, and agent-themed trading bots. Instead, Polosukhin argues that AI will become the primary interface layer for everything online, including cryptocurrencies, wallet abstractions, browsers, and transaction hashes.
“The goal is to make your AI obscure the entire blockchain,” he said. “The fact that we have [blockchain] explorers is effectively a failure, because we do not abstract the technology.”
From this point of view, blockchain does not disappear, but rather recedes. AI agents interact directly with protocols, executing payments, managing assets, coordinating services, and even voting in governance systems. Meanwhile, humans interact with AI.
“AI is the interface, not just for blockchain, but for everything,” Polosukhin said. “In a few years, it will be just AI, like the operating system.”
That shift, he argues, could explain why cryptocurrencies haven’t had an “AI moment” comparable to the consumer explosion of generative tools. “Blockchain is inherently financial,” he said. “It will be limited to finances, but everything we do in our lives is finances.”
Rather than competing with AI platforms, the role of cryptocurrencies may be to provide neutral financial rails beneath them: settlement, ownership, verifiability, and programmable incentives.
Still, Polosukhin criticizes how the industry has approached both AI and governance so far; comments coming just days after Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin proposed “AI stewards” to help reinvent DAO governance.
“In blockchain, we propose technical solutions before asking: what is the core problem?” said.
He points to decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs, as an example. “DAOs have failed dramatically because they were unbounded and not really designed to solve any problems,” he said, arguing that governance tools, including AI-assisted voting agents, only make sense if they are tied to clearly defined economic or coordination needs.
Another point of friction between AI and crypto communities has been culture. “Memecoins are ruining [the industry’s] reputation,” Polosukhin said, arguing that rampant speculation and scams have alienated serious AI researchers. “The AI people are effectively banning cryptocurrencies because of memecoins.”
However, long-term convergence may have less to do with token launches and more to do with infrastructure. As AI systems increasingly act on behalf of users, such as paying bills, contracting services, and allocating capital, they will require reliable execution, privacy, and programmable financial coordination.
“Blockchain is about neutral markets and neutral infrastructure,” Polosukhin said.
If AI becomes the operating system of the Internet, the future of cryptocurrencies may lie not in being the app that users open, but in becoming the invisible settlement layer that its AI agents silently depend on.
Read more: NEAR launches super app Near.com, touting AI capabilities and confidential transactions
