For much of crypto’s history, the primary use case has been simple: buying tokens and trading them.
Now, some investors and developers believe the industry may be moving toward an entirely different model: earning crypto instead of buying it.
One version of that idea is what venture firm Multicoin Capital calls Internet Labor Markets (ILM) — networks where users receive tokens by contributing work, 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 have earned it.”
The concept is starting to gain attention, especially 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 work, 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 job 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 buying tokens first, users complete tasks and receive crypto as payment.
“The idea is simple,” Sengupta said. “There are two ways people enter crypto – either they buy in or they cash in.”
Over the last decade, most users followed the first route. But Sengupta believes the next wave will come from the second.
“If you have a system where you can issue new assets and move them around at super low cost,” he said, “you can coordinate labor globally.”
In practice, this workforce can take many forms – contributing bandwidth, tagging data, reducing energy consumption or performing physical tasks linked to decentralized infrastructure.
“Someone starts a business to find something 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 that largely emerged from the Solana ecosystem – which reward participants for contributing resources, such as wireless coverage or mapping 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 judgment, effort and time,” he said.
Instead of passive contributions, many ILM systems focus on discrete tasks that can be verified and paid immediately. A network can reward users for tagging data, reporting local information, identifying bugs in code, or performing real-world tasks.
The Blockchain Advantage
Blockchain infrastructure makes these systems possible because work can be verified and completed automatically.
In traditional employment systems, payments often require invoices, approvals and delays. ILMs replace this process with deterministic verification – verifying that work is complete and paying contributors instantly through crypto rails.
Much of that work may eventually intersect with artificial intelligence.
One example Sengupta points to 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 manages a multi-billion dollar token hedge fund. In January 2022, the firm said it raised $422 million for a venture fund that supports early-stage blockchain startups.
“People all over the world download the software, contribute extra bandwidth and earn tokens for participating in the network,” he said.
But the model could develop further.
“The next stage is not just scraping data, but humans applying judgment — labeling data, judging quality — in ways that only humans can,” he said.
In other words, the Internet’s next-generation labor markets may involve humans collaborating with AI systems rather than competing against them.
Sengupta argues that artificial intelligence may actually increase demand for distributed human contributors. As businesses become smaller and more automated, they still rely on people for tasks that require judgment, verification or real-world execution.
AI can shrink core teams, he said, but it also increases the need for on-demand contributors — creating demand for systems that can retrieve, verify and pay those contributions globally.
If this vision becomes a reality, crypto’s next adopters may arrive not through speculation at all — but through work.
Read more: Multicoin Capital co-founder Kyle Samani steps down after nearly a decade to pursue other areas of technology
