The future of blockchain may not revolve around human users but artificial intelligence agents, according to Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of the NEAR Protocol. In an interview, Polosukhin argued that AI systems will increasingly act as the main interface for digital services, meaning humans will interact with AI while the AI itself handles transactions on blockchain networks. He summarized the shift by saying that AI will operate on the front end while blockchain functions as the back-end infrastructure.
Polosukhin believes many people misunderstand the future of crypto because today’s blockchain tools—wallets, explorers, and complex transaction interfaces—are difficult for everyday users. In his view, AI agents will abstract away this complexity. Instead of manually managing crypto wallets or signing transactions, users might simply instruct an AI assistant to perform tasks such as paying bills, managing investments, or interacting with decentralized applications, while the AI handles the blockchain interactions automatically.
This shift could create an “agent economy” where autonomous AI systems interact with financial networks and digital services on behalf of humans. For example, AI agents could allocate capital, make payments between services, participate in governance votes, or coordinate supply chains without constant human supervision. Blockchain technology would provide the trust layer for these machine-to-machine transactions by ensuring transparency, verification, and secure settlement.
Polosukhin also noted that crypto has struggled to reach mainstream adoption compared with generative AI tools. He argues that integrating AI with blockchain could solve this problem by hiding the technical complexity behind AI interfaces. In this model, the average user might never directly interact with blockchain at all—AI systems would quietly manage the underlying infrastructure while people simply communicate with intelligent assistants.
