Fireside Chat I Illia Polosukhin & Kartik Talwar I Operating System, Open Web
summary
NEAR describes a working stack: sharded parallel execution that moves beyond the single‑thread block bottleneck, a WASM VM plus account abstraction to make accounts act like contracts, and a Blockchain Operating System that stores cryptographically signed frontends and history on‑chain. Onboarding demos show Fast 5‑second onboarding (email→named account, meta‑txs so users don’t pay fees). Data availability uses sharded history storage; BOS already runs multi‑chain discovery and can serve Ethereum rollups and indexed data.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (22)
- 0:00Intro and welcome to Illia Polosukhin
- 0:38Illia’s background in AI and Google Research
- 1:50Inventing Transformers and “Attention Is All You Need”
- 4:10Launching NEAR AI and challenges with global payments
- 6:31Early blockchain usability challenges
- 8:12Origins of NEAR Protocol
- 9:21Designing for simplicity, security, and scalability
- 10:21The limits of single-threaded blockchains
- 13:07Tackling performance: VM, consensus, and storage
- 15:11Building sharding and parallel execution
- 16:55From Layer 1 to a Blockchain Operating System
- 18:04What BOS enables for developers and users
- 21:02Cross-chain discovery, onboarding, and frontends
- 23:00Overview of a fully open-source, multi-chain future
- 25:02How BOS works with Ethereum and other chains
- 27:06Data storage, frontend history, and integrity
- 30:58Thoughts on Layer 2s and scalability trade-offs
- 34:30Blockchain and AI: data, compute, and models
- 37:07Authenticity and cryptographic signatures in AI
- 41:16Community governance and decentralized identity
- 42:49What decentralization means to Illia
- 44:29Closing remarks and BOS adoption
