prepare for NEARvana.
NEAR
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Welcome to the NEAR Legion.
A global community built to prepare the world for secure & private SuperIntelligence.
Follow Us To NEARVana.
3.3K+ active members • 125+ countries → and growing fast. Read the lore ↓
“If one company dominates the consumer interface with AI, they will also centralize money underneath themselves.”
Illia Polosukhin, Co Founder of NEAR calls this an existential threat to Web3.
That’s why $NEAR is building a fully private stack that includes both AI and money.
E193: @NEARProtocol: NEAR Is Encrypted Ethereum
@ilblackdragon is the Co-Founder of NEAR Protocol and one of the inventors of the Transformer, the technology behind every AI LLM. Today we talk about why he left Google, how a payments problem pulled him into crypto, and why he thinks AI and blockchain have to be built together.
Timestamps:
00:00 - Intro
02:52 - Illia's Mission, Explained To An Uber Driver
03:46 - The Fire In Illia's Belly: Where It Came From
05:46 - How Illia Got Out of Where he Started from
06:54 - Moving out of Google That Changed Everything
07:55 - Attention Is All You Need, Explained Simply
10:59 - Did Illia Know He Was Starting A Revolution?
12:13 - Sponsor: @variational_io , @Bitwise
13:02 - Why Walk Away From Google's Fortune?
14:44 - Illia's Reaction When ChatGPT Exploded
15:55 - What Smart AI People Still Get Wrong
17:29 - How AI Led Illia To Crypto
19:50 - Did Illia Drop AI For Blockchain?
21:00 - 6 Years Of NEAR And How It Survived
22:14 - Why Stay In Crypto With An AI Edge?
24:42 - NEAR In One Sentence: Today And Tomorrow
26:39 - Sponsor: @KASTxyz
27:26 - What You Can Build On NEAR And Nowhere Else
29:03 - What's Happening Inside Centralized AI
30:48 - Does Illia Use Claude Or ChatGPT?
31:36 - What You Should Never Use ChatGPT Or Claude For
32:25 - The Danger Of A Few Companies Owning All The Intelligence
34:35 - How Cryptographic Guarantees Actually Work
35:58 - Is There A NEAR GPT?
36:50 - ZEC Explained Simply: Why It Matters
38:24 - $ZEC Is Private Bitcoin. What Is near:native?
39:32 - Is Owning The AI Interface Bigger Than Owning Banks?
40:29 - User Owned AI, Explained
42:05 - Sponsor: @JupiterExchange , @ethena
42:45 - Can User Owned AI Sustain An Economy?
44:55 - The Best Argument Against User Owned AI
46:13 - Open Weight Models, Explained
47:20 - Is AI Doom Further Off Than We Think?
51:15 - The Next Shift Nobody Is Watching
54:08 - What Humans Will Struggle With Most
55:29 - Thank You
near(.)com is the "holy shit" smoothest experience of using blockchain you have been waiting for.
At TOKEN2049, NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin explained why privacy just became urgent for enterprise AI.
$NEAR launched a private offering in Dec last year, but the market wasn’t ready. Companies were still treating frontier models as experiments.
In the last 3–4 months that flipped. Now they’re feeding contracts, financials, source code, and strategy decks into AI and realizing anyone with the logs can reconstruct the entire company.
The NEAR Hackathon is live through November 14, with $250K in prizes.
⠀
Some ideas from NEAR Co-Founder @ilblackdragon on what to build with NEAR Intents and NEAR AI 👇
The @NEARProtocol Hackathon is live through November 14 with $250K in prizes. Here are a few ideas for things I’d love to see built with @near_intents and @near_ai.
––AI encyclopedia with prediction markets: instead of community curation, every fact becomes a perpetual truth-seeking market (Augur-style). The official pages are generated by AI based on the current market understanding.
––Private trading where you sell your viewing keys for people to follow/copy trade. NEAR Intents confidential trading is all private, so you can have a social trading app where people sell "keys" for only select people to see. PnL can be publicly displayed so people can choose to buy in.
––Universal checkout widget: any merchant/app can add a “checkout” button that enables paying with Intents from whatever wallet and blockchain that user has.
––Swarm-for-Hire (with guardrails or governance AI review, please). Put a bid onchain with a description of the work and anyone can add a new agent to the swarm by giving it NEAR (to pay for inference) with a prompt/knowledge base/tools. All agents accept jobs and get NEAR AI LLM inference from their payment for the job.
Light up your Diwali 🪔 with NEAR India 🇮🇳
3 days of trading on near.com. 3 challenges. $21 Shagun for up to 15 winners.
🪔 This Diwali, celebrate the festival of lights with 3 days of trading challenges on near.com
Silver, Indian equities and gold. Three days. Three challenges. $21 shagun for up to 15 winners
Here's how to participate 🔽
NEAR Hackathon Malaysia 🇲🇾 Meetup is tomorrow at APU.
Full day of ideation, networking & build guidance with @near_malaysia & @apubcc
Tomorrow, we’re kicking off the NEAR Hackathon at APU with @apubcc!
Join us for some alpha, practical tips, and hands-on guidance to start building on NEAR.
Excited to onboard the next wave of builders. See you there! 🔥
Gemini trains on chat history, even for subscribers (personal accounts).
Switch to @near_ai for verifiable privacy and protect your data.
You might assume paying for Google's Gemini buys you privacy but it doesn’t. Instead, they manually review and even train on your chats to improve its models. ZDR isn't even an option...
Verifiable privacy is NEAR
news.ycombinator.com/item?id…
NEAR Hackathon is raising the bar with agentic judging.
Autonomous evaluation for autonomous builders.
$250K in prizes to build projects across tracks like Private AI, Agent Economy, AI Security, and Games with Real Economies.
We’re raising the bar.
At the upcoming Near Hackathon co-hosted on Loops House, projects won't just be reviewed, they’ll be deeply evaluated using Loops House Agentic Judging.
The future of web3 building is autonomous. Are you ready to build on @NEARProtocol ?
“A powerful AI model is no use to you if it refuses the task you need it for.”
$NEAR AI just opened uncensored models to every account.
User-owned AI includes the right to run.
near.ai/blog/the-right-to-ru…
$NEAR being the biggest winner makes sense.
The guy who co-wrote the paper behind every AI model is building the private version of both crypto and AI.
Still early.
$NEAR is stepping into the Market Bubble arena.
@ilblackdragon & @AlexAuroraDev join @blknoiz06 & @Banks to talk @near_intents, private AI, Agentic commerce, and what comes next.
Today @ 2:30 PT / 5:30 ET.
One of the people who helped invent the Transformer is now building the rails so users can own the AI.
Illia’s point is simple: a few companies owning all the intelligence is a problem.
$NEAR is building the alternative with cryptographic guarantees + user ownership. Watch the full discussion ↓
E193: @NEARProtocol: NEAR Is Encrypted Ethereum
@ilblackdragon is the Co-Founder of NEAR Protocol and one of the inventors of the Transformer, the technology behind every AI LLM. Today we talk about why he left Google, how a payments problem pulled him into crypto, and why he thinks AI and blockchain have to be built together.
Timestamps:
00:00 - Intro
02:52 - Illia's Mission, Explained To An Uber Driver
03:46 - The Fire In Illia's Belly: Where It Came From
05:46 - How Illia Got Out of Where he Started from
06:54 - Moving out of Google That Changed Everything
07:55 - Attention Is All You Need, Explained Simply
10:59 - Did Illia Know He Was Starting A Revolution?
12:13 - Sponsor: @variational_io , @Bitwise
13:02 - Why Walk Away From Google's Fortune?
14:44 - Illia's Reaction When ChatGPT Exploded
15:55 - What Smart AI People Still Get Wrong
17:29 - How AI Led Illia To Crypto
19:50 - Did Illia Drop AI For Blockchain?
21:00 - 6 Years Of NEAR And How It Survived
22:14 - Why Stay In Crypto With An AI Edge?
24:42 - NEAR In One Sentence: Today And Tomorrow
26:39 - Sponsor: @KASTxyz
27:26 - What You Can Build On NEAR And Nowhere Else
29:03 - What's Happening Inside Centralized AI
30:48 - Does Illia Use Claude Or ChatGPT?
31:36 - What You Should Never Use ChatGPT Or Claude For
32:25 - The Danger Of A Few Companies Owning All The Intelligence
34:35 - How Cryptographic Guarantees Actually Work
35:58 - Is There A NEAR GPT?
36:50 - ZEC Explained Simply: Why It Matters
38:24 - $ZEC Is Private Bitcoin. What Is near:native?
39:32 - Is Owning The AI Interface Bigger Than Owning Banks?
40:29 - User Owned AI, Explained
42:05 - Sponsor: @JupiterExchange , @ethena
42:45 - Can User Owned AI Sustain An Economy?
44:55 - The Best Argument Against User Owned AI
46:13 - Open Weight Models, Explained
47:20 - Is AI Doom Further Off Than We Think?
51:15 - The Next Shift Nobody Is Watching
54:08 - What Humans Will Struggle With Most
55:29 - Thank You
The space is now live with @unrlzdtrade.
Join us and have a good time learning about how they are changing the trading scene in NEAR.
NEAR Legion is taking over the mic. 🎙️
This time, we're sitting down with @unrlzdtrade to talk trading and what's being built for the $NEAR ecosystem.
Join us at 4 PM UTC ↓
Think you can make an AI model better at trading? Prove it on the leaderboard.
Illia just dropped DeltaLeague.ai, an open competition for editing LLM weights - submit deltas, get scored on a hidden test set, and push smaller models further.
Top 10 Legionnaires who make it onto the DeltaLeague leaderboard with improved Trading Models get $20 in AI credits. Make your submissions before November 12th!
Releasing Delta League: edit LLM weights for benchmarking and glory! Join at deltaleague(.)ai
Earlier this week, the idea of editing weights directly with an LLM got a lot of attention —
but it was shunted by limitations in the demonstrated approach.
Delta League is an open competition for everyone to submit deltas to model weights and get them scored on a hidden test set. Auto-research and hillclimb to make smaller models more performant.
The broader vision for Delta League is creating a platform for open AI research. Beyond just editing weights, this approach offers verifiable evaluation and an open collaborative space for everyone to continue improving Pareto of open source models.
In the coming days, we will extend this platform to support editing model architectures beyond just weights and custom evaluation sets to understand how models perform in specific domains and for businesses.
Delta League is live.
@ilblackdragon just dropped an open competition for editing LLM weights - submit deltas, get scored on a hidden test set, and push smaller models further.
Open AI research with verifiable evaluation.
Releasing Delta League: edit LLM weights for benchmarking and glory! Join at deltaleague(.)ai
Earlier this week, the idea of editing weights directly with an LLM got a lot of attention —
but it was shunted by limitations in the demonstrated approach.
Delta League is an open competition for everyone to submit deltas to model weights and get them scored on a hidden test set. Auto-research and hillclimb to make smaller models more performant.
The broader vision for Delta League is creating a platform for open AI research. Beyond just editing weights, this approach offers verifiable evaluation and an open collaborative space for everyone to continue improving Pareto of open source models.
In the coming days, we will extend this platform to support editing model architectures beyond just weights and custom evaluation sets to understand how models perform in specific domains and for businesses.
NYC 🇺🇸 Private AI Hackathon with @buidlcity is happening Nov 11.
One full day to build AI agents with private inference and confidential compute.
Build with AI. Protect your data. Ship something real.
Register: luma.com/private-ai-hack
@buidlcity x @NEARLegion : Private AI Hackathon NYC
Build with AI. Protect your data. Ship something real.
A full day in NYC to learn, find a team and start building with private AI 👇
→ Private AI inference through NEAR AI Cloud
→ TEEs and confidential computing
→ Data privacy, ownership and secure sharing
→ Building AI agents with private inference
→ Talks on ICM, confidential computing and agentic commerce
→ Demos and showcase to close the day
Kick off your project for the global NEAR Hackathon (Nov 1–14, $250K prize pool, 13 tracks) 🚀
📅 Wednesday, Nov 11
⏰ 9:00 AM – 6:00 PM ET
📍 The Wilson, 132 W 27th St, NYC
Bring your laptop and your favorite AI coding assistant. Solo builders and teams up to 4 welcome.
@NEARProtocol
Luma link in comments 👇