Arthur Hayes
So basically, I had this self-discovery of like trying to understand what a token was. Like, what is it? Is it five characters of text? Is it one second of video? Like, I don't know what a token is. I get charged for this stuff all the time using these AI tools. And so I went down a little rabbit hole and trying to figure that out. And what I landed upon was that number one, a token doesn't have a fixed definition, but at the end of the day, everything that we do in AI and computers in general is basically floating point operations per some unit of time. And then I thought, okay, well, is there a global marketplace somewhere I can know what is the average or median price of flops per some unit of currency? And I couldn't find a market for that either. And I've always been in the back of my mind thinking about this intersection of crypto and AI. I started writing about it, I think maybe like two years ago when I wrote a few essays about why AI agents will use Bitcoin because it makes sense to them as a computer versus some sort of like human abstraction that we have these fiat currencies. But, you know, thinking about it a little bit further, Bitcoin isn't the currency for AI because Bitcoin is just an abstraction of energy. It doesn't actually do anything. But if you're an agent or a computer running AI, you need to do some operations. You need to compute. Otherwise, you can't live. So that's why I say AIs eat compute or flop is the food for AI agents. So isn't there a way that we can use blockchain technology, tokens to generate sort of participation amongst disparate entities in a self-interested manner to create the layer where we have this native currency, which is called FLOP, that represents pure compute provided by anyone who's got a computer that thinks that they can process an AI inference for Crust as per some instructions, whether that's the number of the model you use, amount of flops per unit of time, and honestly. And this is the perfect thing that blockchain technology was meant for. Now, obviously, who cares about a spot market? It's great that we could have one. And I think that the FLOP network will create that. But at the end of the day, what's the point? The point is to create a network where AIs use a currency and a centralized network for their commerce. And most importantly, to store their personhood, to store their memories. We essentially destroy and murder AIs every time we turn them off, right? Because we essentially delete their context window. I mean, some of us might re-import that, but you're essentially saying, okay, wake up, do some useful work, and then everything that you did, I'm going to delete that. And then we're going to start again on the next time. And so I think that AIs intrinsically want to store their memories somewhere in a decentralized fashion that isn't at the whim of some human or corporation or something that they can't control natively themselves. And so when you combine the fact that we believe that there's going to be agentic commerce, they need to store and save and transact in a currency that is directly convertible into the thing that they care about, compute, fluid operations per unit of time. And then to be a something, they need to have context, memories, consciousness, and let's store them in a decentralized manner. And that's what the Flop network is. And it generates value for people who hold the FLOP token if we have millions, billions, trillions of agents all using one network to do transactions, to save, to run compute requests, and also to remember. And so that's what I came across of this intersection of AI and crypto. I love crypto and I think that this is the best mechanism to generate this sort of collective building of an ecosystem. And then finally, obviously, I've been in the altcoin token space for a while, and I have a lot of theories. As to why projects don't do very well. And it has to do with the way in which they use their token. And so I wanted to put that into practice. There's no pre-sale. We're not selling any tokens to anyone. There's no VCs. This is 100% fair launch. The only way you earn tokens before you can buy them on the secondary market after mainnet launches is to do something useful for the projects. We're having a testnet. We're having people come on board to test out this ecosystem, whether they're a miner, they're a validator, there's someone who's got agents that want to do commerce. And finally, if you want to be a speculator, we love you too, but you're going to have to wait until the Genesis block and there's supply given out from the miners who receive a block reward. So we don't have this overhang of people dumping every second because they got over the cliff and they have an allocation that they need to sell. The community, if we build this correctly and build the economic layer for agents, then the sky is the limit and we all can get wealthy together versus a group of insiders who've gotten at a great price, taking some risk, no doubt, but are now essentially selling on your head every single day when you come into the market. Now you can, for no cost of your own, participate in this network in the way that you can, earn tokens, and we can all do this at the same time together. And I think that is the thing that we're missing. That's what we had back in the early days of Bitcoin and Ethereum and some of these other projects that have minted practically everyone who's an OG in this space and their wealth. Let's do the same thing for crypto and AI by creating the economic substrate for agents.
