Sharding for blockchain scalability with NEAR Protocol and Illia Polosukhin

In this episode of The Saito Social we sit down with Illia Polosukhin — co-founder of NEAR Protocol. Illia is an ICPC finalist and has more than ten years of industry experience, including three years at Google where he was a major TensorFlow contributor. NEAR positions itself as a highly scalable, developer-friendly blockchain with the team particularly focused on building a sharded mobile-first protocol.

We first met Illia at the Stanford Blockchain Conference with a follow-up meeting taking place at Tsinghua University in our hometown of Beijing. It was a pleasure to invite him on to our show here in China, to have the opportunity to get a little closer to what NEAR is all about, and to hear his thoughts on proof-of-stake, sharding and scaling.

While visiting, Illia also recorded an episode of NEAR’s Whiteboard Series taking a deep dive in to how Saito works — so look out for that in the future at //nearprotocol.com/blog/