Former Cointelegraph Ceo Joins Ai Agent Chain Phase. Who’s Liable When Agents Pay Wrong?

What Happened

Prikhodchenko announced her exit from Cointelegraph on LinkedIn, closing almost five years at the media group.

The backing behind the company is similarly concentrated. Phase has only one disclosed funder: founder Kirill Eves, who committed the $45 million behind the October 29 mainnet launch. Prikhodchenko joined as co-founder two weeks later. Phase’s token page reserves 25% of the PHASE supply for the core team, but it is undisclosed whether her role carries a share of that allocation.

Market Context

Phase does limit how fast funds enter the network. The bridge credits a single deposit of up to 1,000 USDT and holds anything larger, while total credits are capped at 10,000 USDT per 24 hours, with any excess waiting for the next window.

Why It Matters

That shift places the risk with whoever funds those agents. Their Tether (USDT) is exchanged for a bridged token, USDT.e, which is backed by deposits held at Phase’s bridge address. For now, that token cannot be withdrawn to its original chain.

Details

Phase, a blockchain built for AI agents, named former Cointelegraph chief Yana Prikhodchenko as co-founder and CEO on November 11. Prikhodchenko spent a decade in banking and insurance, and she now runs a network where software pays without human sign-off.

Why Does Agent Infrastructure Need a New Blockchain?

Before moving into crypto media, she spent more than a decade at banks and insurers, including Allianz. In that world, every payment traces back to an identified customer.

Phase switched on its mainnet on October 29, and its documentation shows that agents fund themselves by sending USDT from Ethereum, Base, or three other chains. No sign-up or API key is required, because the wallet that sends the deposit becomes the account.

How is AI moving your money? Explore the findings in BeInCrypto’s State of AI Agent Payments 2026 report.

In her statement on the appointment, Prikhodchenko framed the problem as a technical gap.

“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,” Prikhodchenko, co-founder and CEO of Phase, told BeInCrypto.

Yet the statement does not explain why closing that gap requires a new blockchain rather than existing cloud and payment rails.

Can the Phase CEO Make Agent Payments Bankable?

In the banking world Prikhodchenko comes from, a payment network is judged on who holds the money, who stands behind the business, and who pays when something goes wrong. Phase does not yet clear all three.

Start with custody. Deposited funds become USDT.e, a bridged token backed one-for-one by USDT held at Phase’s bridge address. Because the bridge only runs one way for now, anyone funding an agent can spend USDT.e only inside Phase until withdrawals open, and its value rests entirely on that deposit address.

That token’s value is also unclear. Phone owners who validate the chain earn PHASE, which CoinGecko does not yet list, so what a single phone earns in dollar terms remains unknown for the time being.

The third test, liability, is where the gap is widest. Phase Router, which directs agent requests across AI models, bills each request through x402, a payment standard developed by Coinbase. Like the bridge, that billing ties payments to wallets rather than identified customers.

Phase is not alone in this. It is one of several networks moving AI agent blockchain payments from concept to live traffic, and the same question hangs over all of them: who is liable when an agent pays the wrong party?

BeInCrypto has asked Prikhodchenko where Phase draws that line. Her answer will show whether agent payment networks adopt banking’s accountability rules or write their own.

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