Sal Ternullo

That's their boundaries around this.

What Near AI is doing is providing the shared services infrastructure that imbues security, confidentiality, and privacy by design into the system and allows you to use a cohesive tool set that also allows for agents to transact.

And so it's really the coming together of a trend that we've seen in the past in cloud adoption with the modern AI era, and then layering on top of that the ability to transact seamlessly across any Web3 and any Web2 service soon.

Is Near a privacy token?

This is a good question.

Yeah, I wouldn't just describe NIR as a privacy token, but NIR certainly allows for privacy through confidential transactions and privacy in how you interact with models.

So it's one of the key value attributes that NIR provides, but I wouldn't put it directly in the same category that I would put Zcash.

Yeah, I think that was a spot on synthesis and analysis of what I was describing.

And I think we're seeing this as well, like the retail bid for privacy as a narrative has been clearly expressed with Zcash, right?

We've seen that.

I've had this debate over and over and over again, which is like, does retail, do retail consumers and markets generally care about privacy?

And I think Ollie from A16Z just put out this point where like, you know, people don't actually care about privacy.

But I do feel like, and maybe I'm wrong, maybe we look back and I'm wrong on this point,

With the current kind of social consensus with negative viewpoints towards centralized LLMs and concerns over private information being stored inside of centralized servers, not just API keys like Ilya likes to talk about, but like your most sensitive information in life, the status of your relationship, mental health concerns, physical health concerns, all of that sitting inside of central databases.

You know, there is this kind of collective awakening towards, do we want a future where all of our most sensitive information sits inside the servers of three or four large companies?

Or do we want to realize the power of AI as a technology and still have control and privacy as we do so?

And so I do think we're at this inflection point where privacy actually matters more to retail consumers than it has over the previous two decades.

And I think AI is driving a lot of that kind of wake up call.

Yeah, totally agree.

And I would put Nir very much in the category of will benefit from this.