Phase Names Ex-Cointelegraph Chief Yana Prikhodchenko as Co-Founder and CEO

Prikhodchenko Takes the Phase Helm

Phase, a blockchain designed to let AI agents pay for services on their own, has named Yana Prikhodchenko as co-founder and chief executive, with the appointment announced on November 11. Prikhodchenko disclosed her exit from Cointelegraph on LinkedIn, ending close to five years at the media group, and now leads a network where software settles payments without human sign-off. Phase positions itself as infrastructure for autonomous software that transacts, a category the industry now groups under agentic payments. Before moving into crypto media she spent more than a decade in banking and insurance, including time at Allianz, an industry in which every payment traces back to an identified customer. In her appointment statement she framed the problem as a technical one: “AI agents are moving from answering questions to performing real tasks on our behalf, but the infrastructure they depend on was not built for autonomous systems.” The statement does not explain why closing that gap calls for a new blockchain rather than existing cloud and payment rails. The design places funding risk with whoever finances the agents: their Tether (USDT) is exchanged for a bridged token, USDT.e, which is backed by deposits held at Phase's bridge address and cannot yet be withdrawn to its original chain.

Phase switched its mainnet on October 29. The network's official documentation shows that agents top themselves up by sending USDT from Ethereum, Base, or three further chains, and no registration or API key is needed: the wallet that sends the deposit functions as the account. Speed is the one brake. Deposits of up to 1,000 USDT are credited at once, anything larger is held, and total credits are limited to 10,000 USDT in any 24-hour period, with the surplus queued for the next window.

One Funder, One-Way Bridge

Banking judges a payment network on three questions: who holds the money, who stands behind the business, and who pays when something fails. Phase has not yet answered all three. On custody, deposited funds become USDT.e, a bridged token matched 1:1 by USDT stored at the network's bridge address. Because the bridge currently runs in one direction only, anyone funding an agent can spend USDT.e solely inside Phase until withdrawals open, and the token's value rests entirely on that single deposit address. No off-ramp exists yet, so a funder who changes course must wait for withdrawals to open. The company's backing is similarly concentrated. Phase discloses exactly one funder, founder Kirill Eves, who put up the $45 million behind the October 29 launch. Prikhodchenko joined as co-founder two weeks later. The project's token page allocates 25% of the PHASE supply to the core team, but it does not say whether her role carries a share of that allocation. The token's market value is equally unclear: phone owners who help validate the chain earn PHASE, and with the token absent from major market trackers, what each blockchain node running on a phone earns in dollar terms cannot yet be established. Liability is where the gap is widest. Phase Router, the component that routes agent requests to different AI models, charges for each call through x402, a payment standard built by Coinbase Global. Like the bridge, that billing ties payments to wallets rather than to identified customers, precisely the attribution that banking compliance demands. Phase is not operating alone: several networks are now carrying agent payments from whitepaper to live traffic, and each faces the same unresolved question of who is liable when an agent pays the wrong counterparty.

The deposit caps are the only guardrail doing real work today. A ceiling of 10,000 USDT per 24 hours limits how much value can sit inside the network while custody remains concentrated at one bridge address and the only disclosed backer is its own founder. The appointment gives Phase a chief executive whose core competence is the discipline the network lacks: identified counterparties and a named party accountable when payments go wrong. Two disclosures will show whether agent payment networks adopt banking's accountability rules or write their own: the opening of USDT.e withdrawals, and whether Prikhodchenko's role carries part of the 25% team allocation. Until those answers arrive, liability stays undefined across the emerging PayFi sector, a theme we track in our coverage of Blockchain and AI Synergy.