SAN FRANCISCO, CA - For years, the crypto industry has searched for its next breakout moment — something on the scale of DeFi summer or the NFT boom. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence has quietly embedded itself into daily life. Developers use ChatGPT as a co-pilot. Consumers rely on AI assistants to draft emails, plan travel, and increasingly manage workflows. Crypto, by comparison, still feels infrastructural.

Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of NEAR, believes that divide is about to collapse — but not in the way many expect.

“The users of blockchain will be AI agents,” Polosukhin said in an interview. “AI is going to be on the front end, and blockchain is going to be the back end.”

His framing cuts against much of crypto’s recent experimentation with AI, which has largely centered on speculative tokens, memecoins and agent-themed trading bots. Instead, Polosukhin argues that AI will become the primary interface layer for everything online, including crypto, abstracting away wallets, explorers and transaction hashes.

“The goal is to make your AI hide all the blockchain,” he said. “The fact that we have [blockchain] explorers is effectively a failure, because we don’t abstract the technology.”

In this view, blockchain doesn’t disappear — it recedes. AI agents interact with protocols directly, executing payments, managing assets, coordinating services and even voting in governance systems. Humans, meanwhile, interact with the AI.

“AI is the front end, not just for blockchain, but for everything,” Polosukhin said. “In a few years, it’s going to be just AI, like the operating system.”

That shift, he argues, could explain why crypto hasn’t had an “AI moment” comparable to the consumer explosion of generative tools. “Blockchain is inherently financial,” he said. “It will be limited to finance, but everything we do in our life is finance.”

Rather than competing with AI platforms, crypto’s role may be to provide neutral financial rails beneath them: settlement, ownership, verifiability and programmable incentives.

Still, Polosukhin is critical of how the industry has approached both AI and governance so far — comments that come 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?” he said.

He points to decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs, as an example. “DAOs have dramatically failed because they have been unbounded, not really designed to solve any problem,” he said, arguing that governance tools, including AI-assisted voting agents, only make sense if they’re tied to clearly defined economic or coordination needs.

Another friction point between the AI and crypto communities has been culture. “The memecoins are ruining [the industry's] reputation,” Polosukhin said, arguing that rampant speculation and scams have alienated serious AI researchers. “AI people are banning crypto effectively because of memecoins.”

The longer-term convergence, however, may be less about token launches and more about infrastructure. As AI systems increasingly act on users’ behalf, like paying bills, hiring services, allocating capital, they will require trusted 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, crypto’s future may not lie in being the app users open, but in becoming the invisible settlement layer their AI agents quietly depend on.

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