Bio
Illia Polosukhin is the co-founder of NEAR Protocol, a sharded, developer-friendly, proof-of-stake blockchain platform designed to provide the ideal environment for dApps.
Before creating NEAR, Illia was a major contributor to machine learning, most notably as a co-author of the 2017 paper "Attention is All You Need" which introduced the Transformer model architecture that revolutionized natural language processing and AI.
With experience at Google Research and as an engineering manager, Illia combines deep technical expertise with a vision for more accessible and scalable blockchain infrastructure, aiming to bring Web3 to a billion users.
Career Timeline
Early Career
Illia worked at Google, focusing on machine translation and natural language processing before the transformer revolution.
"Attention is All You Need" Paper
Co-authored the groundbreaking paper that introduced the transformer architecture, revolutionizing natural language processing and AI as we know it.
NEAR Protocol Founding
Co-founded NEAR Protocol with Alexander Skidanov to build a developer-friendly, scalable blockchain platform designed to bring Web3 to a billion users.
NEAR Mainnet Launch
Successfully launched NEAR Protocol mainnet, introducing features like human-readable accounts and a unique sharding solution.
NEAR Ecosystem Growth
Leading NEAR to be a major Layer 1 blockchain with a thriving ecosystem of dApps, DeFi protocols, and NFT platforms.