Arthur Hayes and Flop Labs have proposed FLOP as a currency that autonomous AI agents could use to buy computing power directly, rather than relying on dollars, Bitcoin or conventional payment rails. In a six-part thread on Aug. 27, Flop Labs said there is no efficient spot market that converts money into a known quantity of compute over a known period, adding that agents consume floating-point operations rather than physical goods. Under the proposed Flop Network, GPU operators would provide inference and receive FLOP, validators would cryptographically verify the work, and miners would stake tokens that could be forfeited for false results. Preliminary tokenomics exclude venture capital allocations and presales, project cumulative supply of about 17.2 billion FLOP by year 10, and set annual inflation after year 10 at 0.6%. A 3.5 billion FLOP Genesis airdrop is designated for network participants, although published breakdowns differ: the newer plan lists 1.5 billion for miners, 1.2 billion for agents, 310 million for validators and 790 million for reserves and incentives, while an earlier allocation listed 1.2 billion for miners. Flop Labs is developing a public-source testnet expected to run for about 90 days and plans an AMA hosted by Hayes on X Spaces and YouTube next week. Hayes also argues that AI investment excess is concentrated in data-center debt and unprofitable hyperscaler shares, expects AI spending to slow next year and then contract, and says resulting bailouts could push money into crypto and potentially drive Bitcoin toward $1 million. Adoption remains limited: analyst Jamie Coutts said settlement volume on Coinbase’s x402 agent-payment protocol had fallen 93% this year, though he expects activity to recover in the fourth quarter.