Smartphones join the AI labor force—and earn PHASE while doing the heavy lifting 📱

Phase launched its blockchain on Thursday with a $45 million funding commitment from Unlimit founder Kirill Eves, who will finance the project’s first two years of development and provide another two years of runway. The company said it has no outside investors. Phase is building a network where smartphone users earn PHASE tokens by validating blocks and sharing internet connections through Phase Proxy, which routes AI agents’ web requests over consumer connections.

Eves said the project addresses restrictions encountered by AI agents across websites. “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.” Internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare allows website owners to manage AI traffic, and its settings for new domains block agent and training traffic on pages displaying ads.

Eves founded Unlimit in 2009 and built it into a global payments company. Unlimit said in December 2025 that it served more than 50,000 businesses worldwide. Users can join the Phase network through the Phase app, with participation adjusted according to their device’s battery level and connectivity. “Current flagship smartphones can deliver approximately 35–45 TOPS [trillions of operations per second] of AI processing performance, depending on the device, allowing them to run smaller open-weight AI models locally,” Eves said.

Phase plans to launch two AI services in November: one that lets smartphone users contribute computing power, and another that routes requests across AI models. The company also plans to develop its own model and expand the network to desktops, servers and graphics processing units.

Part of the revenue generated by the AI services would be used to buy PHASE on the open market, with those purchases used to reward node operators. Phase did not disclose how much of its funding has been deployed or what valuation, if any, was assigned to the commitment.