Episode 9: Staking Mondays with Illia Polosukhin of NEAR Protocol

Staking Mondays is a weekly show to share specific knowledge from the staking industry leaders with our community. Powered by StakingRewards.com

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Illia Polosukhin is the CTO and co-founder of NEAR Protocol, a platform that wants to give the power of programming to everyone through enabling entrepreneurs, researchers and every other professional to upload their sketches, which will be rendered into designs, receiving a fully functioning mobile app in return.

Illia has more than 10 years of industry experience, including 3 years at Google where he was a major TensorFlow contributor, author of multiple impactful research papers and a manager of the team building question-answering capabilities for the core Google search.

First Question:

1. Which crypto project spiked your interest first outside of BTC and ETH? And why?

2. What do you think is the biggest challenge to bootstrap a layer 1 proof of stake network? And how are you addressing it?

3. How important do you think is the initial token distribution for the success of a layer 1 network?

4. NEAR has such a beautiful incentives design where inflation is offset by transaction fees. Which project inspired you the most when you designed the economics and incentives for NEAR?

5. What is your go-to-market strategy for NEAR? And are you planning to focus on one specific niche? Like e.g. being “the blockchain for NFTs” or “the blockchain for DeFi”

6. Why should some choose to build a dApp on NEAR instead of on Ethereum?

7. What is your personal relationship (and team relationship) with the Proof of Stake Validators on NEAR? Is a close relationship good or prone to further centralization of the platform?

8. For you as the team behind NEAR, do you see it as a business to make NEAR successful? How are you internally structured? And what are your KPIs

9. What are the best staking / passive income opportunities with Near Protocol?