Arthur Hayes Called AI a Bubble, Now He’s Launching an AI Project

The project would reward miners for supplying useful computing work to AI agents rather than conventional mining activity. Arthur Hayes has said that he is coming out of retirement to lead Flop Labs, a new project centered on a token called $FLOP that aims to work as a kind of currency for AI agents. The announcement doubled as a defense of the move: Hayes, who has spent months warning that AI investment is a bubble, argued the excess sits in the debt piling up to build data centers, not in the underlying technology his new venture is built on. A Fair Launch and a Compute-Backed Token Hayes described $FLOP as “food for your AI agent” and said the token would launch without a presale or venture capital funding. “100% fair launch,” he wrote, adding that he expects a “massive airdrop in Q4” followed by a genesis block in the first quarter of 2027. Flop Labs’ announcement describes the network as a proof-of-useful-inference protocol. Its stated goal is to give AI agents a native currency for buying computing power and storing memories. The project uses floating-point operations, or FLOPs, as the basis for its economic model. Miners would provide computing power and receive $FLOP throug...