Arthur Hayes, co-founder of the cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX, explained to his audience on Saturday that Flop Labs has not issued any tokens, conducted any presales, or launched any memecoins.
He warns that everything trading under the name FLOP today is not a genuine token.
Is the $FLOP token already trading?
Arthur Hayes, co-founder of the cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX, clarified in posts on his X account that Flop Labs has not yet released a memecoin or any other token. He added that he himself will announce the token distribution as soon as it begins “in a few months,” and will announce the mainnet launch next year.
Hayes announced that he is returning from retirement to lead Flop Labs as CEO.
According to Hayes, FLOP will function as “food for your AI agent.” It is expected to be a native currency that autonomous software will spend on computing power, outputting results, and storing data in memory.
Under the proposed scheme, miners will provide computational resources to execute AI tasks, and then earn FLOP (floating-point operations) as block rewards and fees. Validators will verify that the work is performed correctly and also store memory for AI agents.
Hayes claims this token will provide the missing payment system in what he calls the “agent economy.”
He has also previously argued that the real risk associated with AI lies in the debts accumulated during the construction of data centers, estimating back in June that around $1.5 trillion has been borrowed to finance AI infrastructure since November 2022.
Why does Hayes' project face skepticism?
Hayes' warning about potential fake FLOP tokens comes as he still faces questions about his trading history. In June, his family office, Maelstrom, was accused of moving around $1.92 million worth of CARDS tokens to a market maker just days after Hayes publicly talked about the project, Cryptopolitan reported.
A few weeks earlier, blockchain researcher ZachXBT documented that Hayes closed positions in tokens such as HYPE, NEAR, Zcash (ZEC), and Worldcoin (WLD) within two weeks of endorsing them. Hayes responded to these allegations by stating that he “sold the token to a seller who was willing, at a certain price.”
Hayes has repeatedly stated that the FLOP token launch will be “100% fair,” with no presale and no venture capital involvement. However, Flop Labs has yet to publish a whitepaper, a tokenomics schedule, contract addresses, blockchain selection, a testnet, or anything else a buyer could use to verify this claim.
It is this controversial history that explains why a fair launch with rewards for key opinion leaders is drawing particular criticism. The sequence of events in the FLOP project is also quite unusual: the token distribution is scheduled before the blockchain network hosting the tokens is even created.
When asked about the lack of an official document, Hayes responded that the team is “still negotiating with stakeholders” and that infographics will start appearing, beginning with tokenomics.
Notably, Maelstrom announced it will be shutting down by September, and BitMEX plans to close its exchange on September 23, 2026.
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