On September 7, Arthur Hayes released the yellow paper for his new project FLOP on social media. FLOP is a proof-of-useful-work blockchain designed for the agent economy, with its native token FLOP used to pay for inference fees, effectively converting money into computing power and intelligence.
In simple terms, FLOP aims to turn AI inference computing power into a purchasable, verifiable, and settleable on-chain commodity. AI agents pay FLOP to request inference; miners run the models; validators confirm that “the inference is roughly credible and the workload is reasonable,” then settle the reward and block reward.
Token Supply and Distribution
The genesis supply of FLOP is approximately 2.48346 billion tokens, all allocated through airdrops, with no VC pre-mining or auction. The initial reward distribution is: miners 75%, validators 10%, agents 10%, and regular stakers 5%.
Block Reward and Halving
The network has an average block time of one second, with an initial block reward of 96 FLOP. It halves every 730 days, halving five times: from 96 to 48 to 24 to 12 to 6 to 3, then permanently stays at 3 FLOP.
Staking and Penalties
Becoming a miner or validator requires staking FLOP tokens, and dishonest staking behavior will be penalized. Validators act as guardians of the network and manage it through FLOP improvement proposals.