Arthur Hayes bets his AI chain can mine more than memes — testnet drops in weeks 🧠

Arthur Hayes said Flop Labs will launch the FLOP testnet within weeks, setting up the only path to a genesis airdrop for miners, validators, and AI agents. The 90-day trial will run on worthless test tokens, and Flop Labs' own testnet page sets no fixed launch date, tying the start to readiness criteria and allowing an extension if the team misses them.

Hayes, the BitMEX co-founder who left retirement in August to lead Flop Labs, posted the update after TOKEN2049 Singapore, writing, "What a great @token2049 . I got some youthful energy with cellular medicine from @VeritaHealthHQ and then dropped the thinking behind @flop_labs all week. Now it's back on the grid so we can ship FLOP Testnet in a few weeks."

The chain pays 96 FLOP per block, with blocks arriving about every second and a halving every 730 days that echoes the Bitcoin halving cycle at twice the pace, while a September draft caps supply near 18.1 billion tokens after 10 years and reserves 24.3% for the airdrop.

Unlike Bitcoin miners who spend electricity guessing numbers to secure the network, FLOP's proof-of-useful-inference model pays GPU owners for completed AI tasks such as model queries and data storage priced in FLOP, with miners earning block rewards plus most of the inference fees while validators confirm the work.

Validators will compete for 1,000 mainnet seats based on testnet ranking, and agents must spend faucet tokens on inference because simply holding them earns nothing.

The project has no presale and no venture capital allocation, with Hayes saying he funded the team himself, and the FLOP testnet launches into a field already occupied by Render and Ocean Network, both of which rent out idle GPUs for AI work.