Crypto is racing to build payment rails for AI agents. Arthur Hayes, whose new network would charge those agents for computing power, said the token behind it will be worth little more than a marketplace for compute until those agents actually start doing business with each other. He set that limit weeks before the testnet that decides who receives a 3.5 billion token airdrop.

Hayes, CEO of Flop Labs and CIO of Maelstrom, was speaking on Unchained in an interview recorded Sept. 3 and published Monday. Flop is a proposed blockchain where AI agents pay miners for inference under a consensus model the project calls proof of useful inference.

“We’re not gonna achieve any sort of meaningful valuation for the token itself above just operating a really cool spot market for compute unless we have agentic commerce that’s native to the Flop network,” Hayes said on the show.

The Dispute Layer Is Not Built

Asked how Flop would handle agents that disagree, Hayes said the team “haven’t thought about that too deeply on our particular protocol” and is concentrating instead on recruiting miners and validators and on “making sure the AI agents can eat.” He said an adjudication layer was “definitely something that’s absolutely going to be needed” because agents inherit the disagreements of the people who deploy them.

The Airdrop Comes First

Flop’s spec sets out a genesis airdrop of 3,500,000,000 FLOP, or 20.4% of the network’s supply at year 10. Miners and agents can each earn up to 1.2 billion, validators are allotted 305,505,000, and 794,495,000 goes to reserve and growth incentives. The testnet that determines those claims is planned for the fourth quarter of 2026 and runs roughly ninety days, with mainnet to follow in the first quarter of 2027. The document is labeled version 0.1, was updated Aug. 26 and says its figures are provisional, with the definitive Yellow Paper “not yet final.”

Hayes unveiled Flop on Unchained in August. He appeared Monday alongside Albert Castellana, CEO of GenLayer Labs, who said on the show that his network escalates contract disputes to as many as 1,500 AI validators for a verdict. Maelstrom is named among GenLayer’s backers in a $7.5 million seed round led by North Island Ventures. Hayes said the two projects were not planned together: “This idea for Flop just kind of came to me a few months ago when we started building.”

Related Listen: Arthur Hayes on Why AI Agents Will Want to Transact in Units of Compute