Phase Launches Layer 1 Mainnet With $45M Commitment From Unlimit Founder

The smartphone, not the server rack, is the basic unit of participation on Phase, a new Layer 1 blockchain whose mainnet went live on Thursday, October 29. Behind it sits a $45 million funding commitment from Kirill Eves, founder of payments company Unlimit.

Phase says it has no outside investors. Eves' commitment covers the first two years of development and provides another two years of runway. The figure is a pledge rather than a priced venture round: it represents capital committed, not a closed raise.

Phones as validators and proxy nodes

The network is EVM-compatible. Smartphone owners can earn PHASE tokens in two ways: by validating transactions and by sharing their internet connection through the Phase app. Participants can become validators with no initial token stake and no specialized equipment, and validators who also handle Phase Proxy traffic earn additional rewards. Participation is adjusted based on a device's battery level and connectivity.

Phase Proxy launched alongside the mainnet. It routes AI agents' web requests through internet connections that smartphone owners choose to share, and Phase says it costs less than traditional mobile proxies. Eves framed the service around a problem agents face:

"Websites routinely block or rate-limit automated traffic originating from data centers, even when an agent is acting on a legitimate user request,"

Kirill Eves, founder of Unlimit

November services and the revenue model

Two more services are slated for November. One is an AI computing service in which smartphone users contribute computing power; the other will route requests across AI models. Eves argued that current handsets are capable enough for the work:

"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,"

Kirill Eves, founder of Unlimit

The project also plans to develop its own model and expand to desktops, servers and GPUs. Part of the revenue from these services would fund PHASE purchases on the open market, with those tokens then used to reward node operators.

The backer and the open questions

Eves founded Unlimit in 2009 and built it into a global payments company. Unlimit provides payment infrastructure in more than 180 countries, and said in December 2025 that it served more than 50,000 businesses worldwide.

A single backer carries trade-offs. A $45 million commitment gives Phase meaningful runway, but it also concentrates influence in one person.

Users face a practical question of their own. Anyone considering sharing a connection with AI agents will want clarity on what that involves, and how Phase manages Proxy traffic is likely to shape how comfortable people are opting in.

Phase places itself at the intersection of agentic AI and decentralized infrastructure, betting that idle consumer bandwidth and compute can serve agents whose data center traffic websites increasingly turn away.