The Saito Social

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 Seriestaking a deep dive in to how Saito works — so look out for that in the future at //nearprotocol.com/blog/

In this episode of The Saito Social we talk with Mrinal Manohar and Steven Nerayoff from Adaptive Holdings — parent company of CasperLabs in New York. CasperLabs is dedicated to the Correct-by-Construction (CBC) proof-of-stake mechanism proposed by core Ethereum developer Vlad Zamfir. It’s an important consensus mechanism in the POS world.

From being early Ethereum supporters who played an important part in helping Vitalik get the project off the ground, our guests have become leading figures in the American blockchain industry. We were delighted to have the chance to host them here in Beijing, not only to learn more about what makes the CBC approach special, but also for a deeper chat about why they are in China and where they see the US and Chinese crypto communities diverging.