Arthur Hayes Called AI a Bubble, Now He’s Launching an AI Project

Arthur Hayes has said that he is coming out of retirement to lead Flop Labs, a new project centered on a token called $FLOP that aims to work as a kind of currency for AI agents.

The announcement doubled as a defense of the move: Hayes, who has spent months warning that AI investment is a bubble, argued the excess sits in the debt piling up to build data centers, not in the underlying technology his new venture is built on.

A Fair Launch and a Compute-Backed Token Hayes described $FLOP as “food for your AI agent” and said the token would launch without a presale or venture capital funding.

“100% fair launch,” he wrote, adding that he expects a “massive airdrop in Q4” followed by a genesis block in the first quarter of 2027. Flop Labs’ announcement describes the network as a proof-of-useful-inference protocol.