Arthur Hayes Releases FLOP Yellow Paper: AI Inference Power as an On-Chain Product

Martian Finance reports that on September 7, Arthur Hayes released the whitepaper for his new project, FLOP, on social media. FLOP is described as a blockchain and native token designed for the agent economy, enabling useful reasoning proofs. Agents use FLOP to pay miners for reasoning services, directly converting currency into computational power and intelligence. In simple terms, FLOP aims to make AI reasoning compute a tradable, verifiable, and settleable on-chain commodity. AI agents pay in FLOP to request reasoning; miners run models; verifiers confirm that “this reasoning is reasonably trustworthy and computationally justified,” after which rewards and block rewards are settled. In terms of token supply, FLOP’s genesis supply is approximately 2.48346 billion tokens, all allocated via airdrop, with no pre-mining or auction for VCs. Initial reward distribution is set at 75% for miners, 10% for verifiers, 10% for agents, and 5% for general stakers. The network has an average block time of one second, with an initial block reward of 96 FLOP, halving every 730 days for a total of five halvings—reducing from 96 to 48, then to 24, 12, 6, and finally 3 FLOP—after which it remains permanently at 3 FLOP. To become a miner or verifier, one must stake FLOP tokens; dishonest staking behavior will be penalized. Verifiers act as network guardians and manage the network through FLOP Improvement Proposals.