📰 Key Takeaways

Phase is a newly launched blockchain that lets smartphone users earn tokens by helping run AI services. Unlimit founder Kirill Eves has committed $45 million in funding for it, and Phase says it currently has no outside investors. The money covers the first two years of development, plus an extra two years of operating buffer. Phase also rolled out Phase Proxy, a service that routes AI agents’ web requests through the internet connections shared by phone users. Eves points out that websites often block or restrict automated traffic from data centers, even when the agent is acting on behalf of a legitimate user, and as agents take on more cross-site tasks, these restrictions are becoming a major barrier to adoption. Users can join the network through the Phase app and earn PHASE tokens by validating blocks and sharing their connection through the proxy service, with participation adjusting to the device’s battery level and connection status. Eves says today’s flagship phones deliver roughly 35 to 45 TOPS (trillions of operations per second) of AI compute, enough to run smaller open-weight models locally. Phase plans to launch an AI compute service in November that lets users contribute processing power, and a routing service that distributes requests across AI models is expected the same month. The team also plans to build its own models and expand to desktops, servers, and GPUs. Part of the revenue from these services will be used to buy PHASE on the open market, which funds rewards for node operators. Eves founded Unlimit in 2009 and grew it into a global payments company, which said in December 2025 that it serves more than 50,000 businesses.

💬 JudyAI Lab Take

Phase is worth watching because it turns phones into part of the AI infrastructure: users earn tokens by sharing their connection and compute, and founder Kirill Eves, who has committed $45 million, is going after a very real problem, which is AI agents getting blocked all over the web.

For AI builders, the part that hits home is that websites often block or restrict automated traffic from data centers, even when the agent is acting on behalf of a legitimate user. As agents take on more cross-site tasks, these restrictions are becoming a major barrier to adoption. The idea behind Phase Proxy is to send requests out through the connections of ordinary phone users. Eves also notes that flagship phones deliver roughly 35 to 45 TOPS of AI compute, enough to run smaller open-weight models locally, and Phase plans to launch an AI compute service and a cross-model routing service in November. It reflects a design mindset: an agent’s bottleneck isn’t necessarily the model itself, but maybe where it goes out from. Compute, network egress, and request distribution could all become the next layer of infrastructure. That said, whether websites will actually accept this isn’t addressed in the original article.

If you’re building agents that operate across sites, it’s worth taking stock of which sites block them most often, then asking whether your architecture needs a fallback path for these kinds of restrictions.

📅 Source Info

🔗 Further Reading