SAN FRANCISCO, CA – For years, the cryptocurrency industry has been searching for the next breakout moment, something on the scale of the summer of DeFi or the NFT boom. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence is quietly being integrated into everyday life. Developers use ChatGPT as a copilot. Consumers increasingly rely on AI assistants to draft emails, plan trips, and manage workflows. In comparison, cryptocurrencies still feel like infrastructure.
Ilya Poloskin, Co-Founder $NEARbelieves the divide is about to collapse, but not in the way many expect.
“Blockchain users will become AI agents,” Poloskin said in an interview. “AI will be the front end and blockchain will be the back end.”
His framework runs counter to much of the recent AI experimentation in cryptocurrencies, which has largely centered around speculative tokens, meme coins, and agent-themed trading bots. Instead, Poloskin argues that AI will become the primary interface layer for everything online, including cryptocurrencies, abstracting away wallets, explorers, and transaction hashes.
“The goal is to have the AI hide all the blockchain,” he said. “The fact that we have a[blockchain]explorer is effectively a failure because we are not abstracting the technology.”
In this view, blockchain does not disappear, but recedes. AI agents interact directly with protocols to make payments, manage assets, coordinate services, and even vote in governance systems. Humans, on the other hand, interact with AI.
“AI is the front end of everything, not just blockchain,” Poloskin said. “In a few years, it will just be an AI, like an operating system.”
This shift, he argues, could explain why cryptocurrencies have not experienced an “AI moment” comparable to the explosion of consumer generation tools. “Blockchain is essentially financial,” he said. “It’s limited to finance, but everything we do in life is finance.”
Rather than competing with AI platforms, the role of cryptocurrencies may be to provide neutral financial rails beneath AI platforms, including payment, ownership, verifiability, and programmable incentives.
Still, Poloskin is critical of how the industry has approached both AI and governance to date, and his comments come just days after Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin proposed an “AI steward” to help reinvent DAO governance.
“With blockchain, we propose technical solutions before asking, what is the fundamental problem?” he said.
He cites decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) as an example. “DAOs have failed dramatically because they are open-ended and not really designed to solve problems,” he said, arguing that governance tools, including AI-assisted voting agents, only make sense if they are tied to clearly defined economic and coordination needs.
Another point of friction between the AI and cryptocurrency communities is culture. “Meme coins are ruining the (industry’s) reputation,” Poloskin said, arguing that rampant speculation and fraud are driving away serious AI researchers. “AI people are effectively banning cryptocurrencies because of meme coins.”
However, long-term convergence is likely to be less about token launches and more about infrastructure. AI systems increasingly perform functions on behalf of users, such as paying bills, hiring services, allocating capital, and more, requiring trusted execution, privacy, and programmable financial coordination.
“Blockchain is about neutral markets and neutral infrastructure,” Poloskin said.
If AI becomes the internet’s operating system, the future of cryptocurrencies may lie less in becoming an app that users open and more in becoming an invisible payment layer that AI agents secretly rely on.
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