BitMEX founder Arthur Hayes has released the official whitepaper for the FLOP network, a blockchain specifically designed to allow autonomous artificial intelligence agents to directly pay miners for computational inference. The FLOP concept - short for floating-point operations - was first announced on August 18, 2026. Hayes dubbed the project “food for your AI agent,” with its native token now positioned as the primary currency for AI compute services.
The entire initial supply of 2.48346 billion FLOP tokens will be distributed to the public through a massive airdrop in the fourth quarter of 2026, without any presale phases or venture capital allocations. The genesis block launch is scheduled to follow in the first quarter of 2027. Flop Labs is targeting a market niche where autonomous agents are increasingly paying operational fees on-chain, following the trend of XRP Ledger, which had already processed 1.4 million AI agent transactions as of last July.
Inference-Based Consensus
Instead of mining purely for chain security, the network implements a Proof of Useful Inference (PoUI) consensus mechanism that requires miners to execute AI inference requests to earn rewards. The mechanism operates linearly: agents submit session requests to the mempool detailing model hashes, maximum latency limits, required FLOP loads, and handling fees. Responding miners then execute the inference and return proof of work before it is validated and included in a block.
Confidential computing is treated as an optional feature rather than a mandatory requirement, allowing standard GPU setups to participate in mining. The network aims for high-speed performance with an average block time of one second and sub-second deterministic finality. For each block, the system distributes 96 FLOP tokens with the following breakdown: 75% for miners, 10% for validators, 10% for agents, and 5% for stakers.
Continuous Token Minting
A halving scheme is set to occur five times. The block reward of 96 tokens will be cut to 48, 24, 12, 6, and eventually settle at 3 FLOP permanently. Unlike Bitcoin, which will eventually cease minting new coins, FLOP emissions will never hit zero to ensure artificial intelligence entities always have a medium of exchange to sustain their operations.
Reported by crypto.news.
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Disclaimer: This article is for informational and educational purposes only, not financial advice. Cryptocurrency assets are highly volatile and carry significant risk. Always do your own research (DYOR) and never invest more than you can afford to lose.
