Someone built a Telegram community over years. Wrote the content, answered the questions, kept the conversation going. When a new person shows up and wants in, they solve a CAPTCHA that benefits Google or Cloudflare and nobody else. The group owner gets nothing. The attention spent is gone.
Canvas puts that moment to work. The new member answers a short question matched to the group's topic. The advertiser gets a verified human response with real audience context. The group owner receives USDC. Same ten seconds, different outcome.
The longer-term project is straightforward: group owners should have direct revenue from the communities they built. Not from brand deals they have to chase, not from platform ad splits that require scale they don't have yet. From the membership activity that's already happening.
Crypto is where we're starting because both sides of the market already speak the language. But the goal is bigger. A Taylor Swift fan community, a fitness group, a cooking channel: every topic has group owners doing real work with no way to earn from it. Canvas is building the infrastructure to change that.
Rohit had been working on the same problem for several years before Canvas had a name: the CAPTCHA is a toll booth that collects human attention and pays it to nobody. The question was how to redirect that value to the people who built the community hosting it.
At DevConnect 2025 in Buenos Aires, EigenCloud and the Ethereum Foundation's Developer Growth team co-organized The Vault, a builder residency for teams working on verifiable applications. Canvas was selected as one of five finalists and presented the protocol architecture to the cohort.
That version ran on EigenLayer. The current version runs on Base mainnet: USDC settlements, a live escrow contract, AI scoring on every response before any payout clears. The mechanism is the same one that got selected in Buenos Aires. The stack is the one that ships.
Two founders from the University of Toronto. Rohit brought the idea. Alex joined and they've been building together since.
Rohit spent five years covering the infrastructure layer of crypto from the inside: content at 0x (the swap infrastructure powering Bankr, Coinbase, MetaMask, and Robinhood) and Caldera (Rollup-as-a-Service), and research at InfStones. He has a degree in Applied Statistics from the University of Toronto and has been developing the Canvas concept for three years.
He brought the original idea and the marketplace design. He and Alex build and iterate together; Alex contributed key architectural decisions including the conversational captcha flow. He left 0x in June 2026 and is fully committed to Canvas.
Alex is an MEng candidate in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto, supervised by Professor Steve Mann. A Schulich Leader and NSERC USRA recipient, he has co-authored five papers published at IEEE ICCE 2026.
He joined as co-founder after Rohit brought the original idea, and the two build and iterate together. Alex contributed key architectural decisions, including the conversational captcha flow, where a cheap LLM probes thin answers to produce richer signal. He owns the full engineering stack: Railway deployment, Telegram bot infrastructure, smart contract integration, and AI scoring layer.
Discord, the open web, and every other platform where communities gather have the same join moment. Telegram is where we prove the model.
If you have a Telegram community and want to start earning from it, or if you want to reach a specific crypto-native audience, get in touch.