For much of crypto history, the primary use case has been simple: buy tokens and trade them.
Now, some investors and builders believe the industry could be moving toward a completely different model: earning crypto instead of buying it.
One version of this idea is what venture capital firm Multicoin Capital calls Internet Labor Markets (ILM) – networks in which users receive tokens for contributing their labor, resources, or expertise.
“The reason people get their first crypto in the future won’t be because they bought it,” Sengupta said in an interview with CoinDesk. “It will be because they deserved it.”
The concept has started to attract attention, particularly in ecosystems like Solana, where a growing number of projects are experimenting with networks that reward users for completing verifiable tasks.
This shift – from speculation to profit – is at the heart of internet labor markets, where users contribute their labor, resources or judgment to decentralized networks and receive tokens in return. If the model catches on, Sengupta believes crypto could evolve into something closer to a global labor market.
For most of crypto’s existence, participation meant converting traditional money into digital assets such as bitcoin, ether, or solana before interacting with the ecosystem. ILMs reverse this dynamic: instead of first purchasing tokens, users complete tasks and receive cryptocurrencies as payment.
“The idea is simple,” Sengupta said. “There are two ways people can get into crypto: they either buy or they earn.”
Over the past decade, most users have followed the first route. But Sengupta believes the next wave will come from the second.
“If you have a system that allows you to issue new assets and move them around at a very low cost,” he said, “you can coordinate the work globally.”
In practice, this work can take many forms: contributing bandwidth, labeling data, reducing energy consumption, or performing physical tasks related to decentralized infrastructure.
“Someone starts a company to source something that the market needs, and 50,000 people around the world can be paid to produce that labor,” Sengupta said.
The concept builds on previous crypto experiments, such as decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN) – a category of projects largely drawn from the Solana ecosystem – which reward participants for contributing resources, such as wireless coverage or map data.
But Sengupta believes the next phase goes beyond hardware.
“The system is moving from just plugging in hardware to people doing more active work – contributing their judgment, effort and time,” he said.
Instead of passive contributions, many ILM systems focus on discrete tasks that can be verified and paid for instantly. A network can reward users for labeling data, reporting local information, identifying bugs in code, or completing real-world tasks.
The advantage of blockchain
Blockchain infrastructure makes these systems possible because work can be verified and settled automatically.
In traditional employment systems, payments often require invoices, approvals and delays. ILMs replace this process with deterministic verification: confirming that work has been completed and instantly paying contributors via cryptographic rails.
Much of this work could ultimately intersect with artificial intelligence.
One example Sengupta cites is Grass, a network that allows users to share unused Internet bandwidth through software installed on their devices. The bandwidth can then be used for data scraping tasks to help train AI models.
Multicoin Capital is a crypto investment firm that runs a multi-billion dollar tokenized hedge fund. In January 2022, the company said it had raised $422 million for a venture fund supporting early-stage blockchain startups.
“People from all over the world download the software, contribute available bandwidth and earn tokens by participating in the network,” he said.
But the model could still evolve.
“The next phase is not just about retrieving data, but about humans exercising discretion – labeling data, judging quality – in a way that only humans can do,” he said.
In other words, the next generation of internet job markets could involve humans collaborating with AI systems rather than competing with them.
Sengupta says AI could actually increase demand for distributed human contributors. As businesses become smaller and more automated, they continue to rely on people for tasks that require judgment, verification, or real-world execution.
AI may shrink core teams, he said, but it also increases the need for on-demand contributors, creating demand for systems that can search, verify and pay for those contributions on a global scale.
If this vision comes to fruition, the next crypto users might not arrive through speculation at all, but through work.
Read more: Kyle Samani, co-founder of Multicoin Capital, resigns after nearly a decade to pursue other areas of technology.
