BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes is coming out of retirement to lead Flop Labs, a project building a token-based economy for autonomous AI agents, he said in a post on X.
The move comes less than a month after BitMEX, which popularized the perpetual swap, a never-expiring derivative now traded across crypto markets, said it would shut down on Sept. 23 after 11 years.
"$FLOP is food for your AI agent," Hayes said, describing a token agents would use to buy their own compute and storage. Miners would run AI workloads under a model Hayes calls proof-of-useful-inference, Crypto Briefing reported.
Hayes said it will be a "100% fair launch," with no presale or VCs, and to expect a "massive airdrop" in Q4 and a genesis block in Q1 2027.
He stepped down as BitMEX CEO in 2020 amid a Bank Secrecy Act case over the exchange's missing anti-money-laundering program, which ended in six months of home detention and a 2025 pardon from President Donald Trump.
HOW AI WAS USED IN THE PRODUCTION OF THIS PIECE: I drafted this story on Claude Desktop using my custom x-post-story skill, which read Arthur Hayes's announcement on X through the Claude in Chrome browser connector. I filed it to DeAI News through the Distro Publisher MCP connector. I checked the facts independently prior to publication.