A New Blockchain Wants to Pay Your Phone to Power AI Agents: Inside the 45 Million USD Phase Launch

A brand-new blockchain called Phase launched on Thursday with a 45 million USD funding commitment from a payments billionaire — and its business model is one of the strangest yet: it pays everyday smartphone owners tokens for validating transactions and sharing their internet connections with AI agents.

By Keisha Williams | October 29, 2026

Phase, a new blockchain network built around AI workloads, announced its mainnet launch alongside Phase Proxy — a service that routes AI agents’ web requests through internet connections shared by ordinary phones. The project has no outside investors, and its entire early budget comes from one person: Kirill Eves, founder of the global payments company Unlimit, who has committed 45 million USD to cover the network’s first two years of development plus another two years of runway.

The Hook: Your Phone Becomes a Mini Data Center

Here is the idea in plain English. AI agents — software programs that browse the web and complete tasks on people’s behalf — are increasingly blocked by websites that don’t want automated traffic. Phase’s answer is to route those agents’ requests through real smartphones belonging to real people, making the traffic look like it comes from ordinary consumers. In exchange for sharing your connection and computing power, you earn PHASE tokens.

“Websites routinely block or rate-limit automated traffic originating from data centers, even when an agent is acting on a legitimate user request,” Eves told Cointelegraph. “As agents take on more tasks across multiple websites, these restrictions are becoming a significant barrier to their adoption.”

The Evidence: What the Network Actually Does

Phase is not just a proxy service. It is a full blockchain where smartphone owners participate in two ways: validating blocks (helping process and secure the network’s transactions) and sharing their internet connection through the proxy service. Both activities earn PHASE tokens.

• Mainnet launch — Announced Thursday, October 29, 2026, alongside the Phase Proxy service.
• 45 million USD commitment — From Eves personally; no outside investors, covering roughly four years of runway.
• On-device AI power — Current flagship smartphones deliver roughly 35–45 TOPS (trillions of operations per second) of AI processing, enough to run smaller open-weight AI models locally.
• Two more services in November — An AI computing service using phones’ chips, and a service that routes requests across multiple AI models.
• Battery-aware design — Participation is adjusted based on a device’s battery level and connectivity.

Internet infrastructure giant Cloudflare is part of this story too. Cloudflare lets website owners manage AI traffic, and for new domains its default settings block agent and training traffic on ad-displaying pages. That growing wall between AI agents and the open web is exactly the gap Phase hopes to monetize.

The Core Conflict: Innovation or a Loophole?

Phase sits in an uncomfortable middle ground. Its backers frame it as infrastructure for a legitimate future — AI agents acting on your behalf need to reach the web, and data-center blocks are overbroad. Critics would frame it differently: a network that pays people to help automated traffic evade the very controls websites put up. Both descriptions are, factually, describing the same service.

The project also plans to build its own AI model and expand beyond phones to desktops, servers, and graphics processing units. Part of the revenue from its services would fund PHASE purchases on the open market, which would then be used to reward node operators — a loop designed to tie network usage to token demand. Whether that loop creates real value or just real volatility is the open question every new token project faces.

Then there is the track record question. “Earn tokens by sharing your device” projects — from bandwidth-sharing to compute-sharing schemes — have launched many times before, and most delivered pennies per month to participants while the tokens themselves collapsed. Phase’s difference is its funding model: no venture investors means no pressure to hype, but also no institutional diligence beyond one founder’s conviction.

Market Implications: What This Means for You

Phase is a niche experiment, but it points at two trends worth understanding: decentralized physical infrastructure networks (blockchains that pay people to share real-world resources) and the AI agent economy (software that transacts on its own). Bitcoin trading around 80,000 USD and Ethereum around 2,320 USD grab the headlines, but the next wave of crypto projects is betting on AI, not payments.

• If you’re tempted to install the Phase app — treat earned tokens as speculative. Battery drain, data usage, and letting unknown AI traffic flow through your connection are real costs; the reward may never exceed them.
• If a stranger’s traffic flows through your IP address — you could, in the worst case, be legally associated with whatever that traffic does. No amount of token rewards makes that risk worth ignoring.
• If you follow AI-crypto tokens — note the design choice: revenue-funded token buybacks rather than pure inflation rewards. It is a more sustainable mechanism, but only if the underlying services generate actual revenue.
• If you’re a long-term investor — the 45 million USD is a founder’s bet, not market validation. Watch whether the November AI computing launch attracts real users.

The Verdict

Phase is one of the more creative attempts to answer a genuinely new problem: AI agents are becoming first-class citizens of the internet, and the internet was never built for them. Whether the answer should be a token-paying smartphone network is anyone’s guess. What is certain is that the collision between blockchain incentives and AI infrastructure will produce many more experiments like this one — and most of them will fail.

For regular investors, the smart play is observation, not participation. Watch whether Phase’s November launches generate real usage, whether Cloudflare and other gatekeepers push back, and whether phone-based earning ever exceeds pocket change. The projects that survive that gauntlet will be the ones worth a closer look.

The cryptocurrency market remains highly volatile. This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice.