Phase Blockchain Launches With $45M Backing From Unlimit Founder

Phase, a newly launched blockchain that pays smartphone users tokens for validating transactions, has secured a $45 million funding commitment from Kirill Eves, founder of the payments company Unlimit. The company announced its mainnet launch on Thursday alongside Phase Proxy, a service that routes AI agents' web requests through smartphone-shared internet connections.

The single-backer structure is unusual. Phase confirmed it has no outside investors; Eves' $45 million covers the first two years of development and provides an additional two years of runway. That concentration cuts both ways — decisions are simple, but the network's survival depends on one individual's continued commitment, a point the announcement does not address.

Eves framed the proxy service as an answer to a concrete infrastructure problem. "Websites routinely block or rate-limit automated traffic originating from data centers, even when an agent is acting on a legitimate user request," he told Cointelegraph. "As agents take on more tasks across multiple websites, these restrictions are becoming a significant barrier to their adoption."

In plain terms: the internet is increasingly hostile to AI agents, and Phase wants to route their traffic through residential mobile connections instead of data centers.

What sits between Phase and the market?

The competitive backdrop is not empty. Cloudflare, a major internet infrastructure provider, already lets website owners manage AI traffic, and for new domains its default settings block agent and training traffic on pages that display ads. Phase's residential-routing model therefore operates against an active counterparty — the same website operators deploying those blocks — and no announced agreements with major sites exist yet.

Eves brings payments-industry credentials to the project. He founded Unlimit in 2009 and built it into a global payments company; Unlimit stated in December 2025 that it serves more than 50,000 businesses worldwide. Whether that operational experience translates to blockchain infrastructure remains untested.

How do smartphone users actually earn PHASE?

Participants join through the Phase app and earn PHASE tokens by validating blocks and sharing their internet connection through the proxy service. The model rests on the claim that modern handsets carry real computing capacity.

"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. For scale, 40 TOPS is the processing tier chipmakers market for on-device AI assistants — sufficient for small models, not for large commercial ones.

The system adjusts participation based on each device's battery level and connectivity. This is a practical concession: a phone at 15% battery validating blocks is a poor experience, and the design acknowledges it.

What arrives in November?

Phase plans two launches for November: an AI computing service that lets smartphone users contribute processing power, and a second service that routes requests across multiple AI models. Beyond that, the company said it intends to develop its own model and expand to desktops, servers and graphics processing units.

The tokenomics are worth noting. Part of the revenue from these services would fund PHASE purchases on the open market, with those tokens used to reward node operators. That structure ties rewards to actual service revenue rather than pure token emission — a healthier design, but only if demand for the services materializes. The announcement offers no revenue projections or signed customers.

The takeaway is straightforward: Phase has capital, a working mainnet and a defensible thesis about AI agents meeting resistance online, but its November service launches are the first real test of whether anyone will pay for smartphone-routed traffic.