For much of crypto’s history, its primary use was simple: buying tokens and trading them.
Now, some investors and builders believe the industry may adopt a completely 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 in which 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 earned it.”
The concept is starting to gain traction, especially 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 earning—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 holds, 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 like bitcoin, ether, or solana before interacting with the ecosystem. ILMs flip that dynamic: instead of first purchasing tokens, users complete tasks and receive crypto as payment.
“The idea is simple,” said Sengupta. “There are two ways people enter crypto: they buy or they earn.”
Over the past decade, most users have taken 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 at super low cost,” he said, “you can coordinate labor globally.”
In practice, this work can take many forms: contributing bandwidth, tagging data, reducing energy consumption, or performing physical tasks associated with the decentralized infrastructure.
“Someone starts a business to buy something the market needs, and 50,000 people around the world can get paid for producing that labor,” Sengupta said.
The concept builds on previous crypto experiments, such as decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN) – a category of projects largely spawned from the Solana ecosystem – that 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 simply connecting hardware to people doing more active work – contributing insight, effort and time,” he said.
Instead of passive contributions, many ILM systems focus on individual tasks that can be verified and paid for immediately. A network can reward users for labeling data, reporting local information, identifying bugs in code, or completing hands-on assignments.
The blockchain advantage
Blockchain infrastructure makes these systems possible by allowing work to be automatically verified and settled.
In traditional labor systems, payments often require invoices, approvals, and delays. ILMs replace that process with deterministic verification – confirming that work has been completed and contributors are paid immediately via crypto rails.
Much of that work could 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>
If this vision becomes a reality, crypto’s next adopters may not come through speculation at all, but through work.
Read more: Multicoin Capital co-founder Kyle Samani steps down after nearly a decade to focus on other technology areas
Credit : cryptonews.net
