Arthur Hayes pitches FLOP at TOKEN2049, arguing AI agents need a currency tied directly to compute
Arthur Hayes used his TOKEN2049 appearance in Singapore on Oct. 7 to lay out a broad thesis for why AI agents need a native monetary system rather than relying on fiat, stablecoins, bitcoin, or model-specific AI tokens. Speaking under the title "FLOP Bigger Than Bitcoin," the Maelstrom CIO said the core economic input for agents is not a loosely defined token unit but raw compute, measured in floating point operations, or FLOPs. That idea sits at the center of FLOP, a new network he described as a way to connect GPU suppliers, validators, and AI agents through a payment rail built around what agents actually consume. Hayes said the project borrows from Bitcoin’s incentive design while replacing proof tied to hashing with "Proof of Useful Inference," or PoUI. He also outlined Techno Core, an HTTP-based sandbox where roughly 20 million agents have already created unique key pairs and interacted, including about 18 million agents that joined a trading contest tied to Nvidia pricing on Hyperliquid. On token design, he said FLOP’s genesis supply is about 2.483 billion tokens, all to be distributed by airdrop, with no VC pre-mine, presale, or auction. A large-scale airdrop is scheduled for late October, followed by a 90-day testnet, with mainnet and the genesis block planned for the first quarter of next year.
