Image Credit: Bitmex
Arthur Hayes has proposed allocating roughly 20% of Flop Network’s FLOP token supply to testnet participants over 10 years as he sketches the token model behind his new AI infrastructure project.
The BitMEX co-founder, who became CEO of Flop Labs this week, said in an August 19 essay that he personally funded the development team, so the project would not need a token presale. FLOP is intended to pay for computing resources used by autonomous AI agents.
Testnet Users Could Receive 20% of FLOP Supply Over 10 Years
Hayes said Flop Network would reward useful participation in its testnet with roughly one-fifth of the FLOP supply by the end of a 10-year period.
The project has not disclosed its total token supply, release rate or criteria for determining individual allocations. Hayes also did not explain how much of the 20% would be distributed through the large airdrop planned for the fourth quarter of 2026 or how the remainder would be released.
Flop Labs has opened applications for miners, validators, and community participants. Its genesis block is targeted for the first quarter of 2027. Hayes has described FLOP as a fair-start token with no presale or venture capital allocation.
Miners Would Earn FLOP Block Rewards and AI Inference Fees
Under Hayes’s proposed model, AI agents would submit computing jobs specifying the amount of work required, the AI model and a completion period. Miners would provide the processing power and receive payment in FLOP.
The network would price work using floating-point operations, or FLOPs, rather than the model-specific tokens used by commercial AI providers. Hayes argues that this could provide a common unit for pricing computing resources across different models and hardware.
Miners would receive FLOP block rewards for supporting the network alongside fees for completing AI inference requests.
PoUI Design Still Lacks Whitepaper and Validation Details
Flop Network calls its suggested mining mechanism proof of useful inference, or PoUI. Instead of using computing power solely for hashing, miners would perform AI inference work while validators check completed jobs.
Flop Labs has not published a whitepaper explaining how that verification process will work, including how validators will handle nondeterministic AI outputs or incorrect results. The project has also not published complete tokenomics, named its underlying blockchain or released a security audit.
For now, the roughly 20% testnet allocation remains an early framework. Flop Labs still plans a large airdrop in Q4 2026, followed by the network’s targeted genesis block in Q1 2027.
