For much of cryptocurrency history, the primary use case has been simple: buy tokens and trade them.
Now, some investors and builders believe the industry may be moving toward an entirely different model: earning cryptocurrency instead of buying it.
One version of that idea is what venture firm Multicoin Capital calls Internet Labor Markets (ILM): networks in which users receive tokens by contributing work, resources or experience.
“The reason people will get their first cryptocurrency in the future will not be because they bought it,” Sengupta said in an interview with CoinDesk. “It will be because they earned it.”
The concept has begun to gain attention, particularly in ecosystems like Solana, where a growing number of projects are experimenting with networks that reward users for completing verifiable tasks.
That 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 takes hold, Sengupta believes cryptocurrencies could evolve into something closer to a global labor market.
For most of cryptocurrency’s existence, staking meant converting traditional money into digital assets like bitcoin, ether, or solana before interacting with the ecosystem. ILMs change that dynamic: instead of purchasing tokens first, users complete tasks and receive cryptocurrency as payment.
“The idea is simple,” Sengupta said. “There are two ways people get into cryptocurrencies: they buy or they earn.”
Over the past 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 at super low cost,” he said, “you can coordinate labor globally.”
In practice, that work can take many forms: contributing bandwidth, tagging data, reducing energy consumption, or performing physical tasks linked to a decentralized infrastructure.
“Someone starts a company to get something the market needs, and 50,000 people around the world can get paid to produce that labor,” Sengupta said.
The concept builds on previous crypto experiments, such as decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePINs), a category of projects that largely emerged from the Solana ecosystem, which rewards participants for contributing resources, such as wireless coverage or mapping data.
But Sengupta believes the next phase goes beyond hardware.
“The system goes from simply connecting 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 for instantly. A network could reward users for labeling data, reporting local information, identifying bugs in code, or completing real-world tasks.
The blockchain advantage
Blockchain infrastructure makes such systems possible because work can be verified and settled automatically.
In traditional employment systems, payments often require invoices, approvals, and delays. ILMs replace that process with deterministic verification: they confirm that the work was completed and pay taxpayers instantly via crypto rails.
Much of that work may ultimately 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 mining tasks to help train AI models.
Multicoin Capital is a cryptocurrency investment company that manages a multi-million dollar token hedge fund. In January 2022, the company said it had raised $422 million for a venture fund that backs early-stage blockchain startups.
“People from all over the world download the software, contribute additional bandwidth and earn tokens for participating in the network,” he said.
But the model could evolve further.
“The next phase is not simply extracting data, but humans applying discretion (labeling data, judging quality) in ways that only humans can,” he said.
In other words, the next generation of Internet labor markets may involve humans collaborating with AI systems rather than competing against them.
Sengupta argues that AI could actually increase demand for distributed human contributors. As companies become smaller and more automated, they still rely on people for tasks that require real-world judgment, verification, or execution.
AI can reduce core teams, he said, but it also increases the need for on-demand contributors, creating demand for systems that can source, verify and pay those contributions globally.
If this vision comes to fruition, the next users of cryptocurrencies may not come through speculation, but through work.
Read more: Multicoin Capital co-founder Kyle Samani resigns after almost a decade to pursue other areas of technology.
