NEAR has an unusually distinctive origin story: in June 2017, Illia Polosukhin (a Ukrainian-born computer scientist, previously an engineering manager at Google Research) and Alexander Skidanov (previously at Microsoft, then a builder of one of the first production-grade distributed databases at MemSQL) founded “Near.ai,” a pure artificial intelligence startup aiming to build AI models that could write code from natural language descriptions.
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In 2017, at Google, Polosukhin co-authored “Attention Is All You Need,” the paper that introduced the Transformer architecture — the foundation underlying today's large language models, including ChatGPT and Claude.
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The team tried to pay their AI project's crowdsourced contributors via Ethereum, but found the network unfit for the purpose (too slow, too expensive) — that frustration led them to start building their own blockchain instead.
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2018: NEAR Protocol is officially founded, now with a blockchain focus; the Switzerland-based, non-profit NEAR Foundation is established to support the ecosystem.
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April 2020: mainnet launches; by September the network becomes fully community-operated; in October, a community vote enables token transfers.
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November 7, 2023: Illia Polosukhin becomes CEO of the NEAR Foundation.
NEAR uses a sharding technology called Nightshade and Proof-of-Stake consensus, with roughly 600-millisecond block times — by 2026 the project had deliberately adopted a “the blockchain for AI” positioning, built around autonomous AI agents and cross-chain “Intents”/Chain Abstraction.