Arthur Hayes has expanded his thesis for Flop Labs, an AI payment project he recently announced, arguing that autonomous AI agents need money directly redeemable for computing power rather than dollars, Bitcoin or conventional payment rails. In a six-part thread on August 27, Flop Labs said there is no efficient spot market for converting money into a known quantity of compute over a known period. Because agents consume floating-point operations rather than physical goods, the project argues that their money should be usable for the resources they actually consume. The proposed Flop Network would have GPU operators provide inference and receive FLOP, while validators cryptographically verify the work and miners stake tokens that can be forfeited for false results. Preliminary tokenomics project about 17.2 billion FLOP by year 10, with no venture capital allocation or presale. A Genesis airdrop is set at 3.5 billion tokens, including 1.5 billion for miners, 1.2 billion for agents, 310 million for validators and 790 million for reserves and incentives. A public-source testnet is planned to run for about 90 days. Hayes also argues that AI investment excess is concentrated in data-center debt and unprofitable hyperscaler shares, rather than agentic technology itself. The BitMEX co-founder expects AI spending to slow next year and then contract, potentially prompting bailouts larger than those seen in 2008 and directing new money into crypto, with Bitcoin potentially reaching $1 million. Adoption remains limited: analyst Jamie Coutts said settlement volume on Coinbase's x402 agent payment protocol had fallen 93% this year, although he expects activity to recover in the fourth quarter.