Arthur Hayes warns fake FLOP tokens circulate before airdrop

Arthur Hayes, the BitMEX cofounder, told his X followers Saturday that Flop Labs has not issued any token, held no pre-sale, and released no memecoin. Anything trading under the FLOP name today is not the genuine token, he said.

Hayes said he will announce the airdrop himself once it begins "in a few months" and flag the mainnet when it goes live next year. He came out of retirement roughly four days before that post to run Flop Labs as chief executive.

FLOP, in Hayes's description, is meant to be "food for your AI agent." The token would let autonomous software pay for computing power, inference, and memory storage. Under the proposed design, miners supply computing power for AI tasks and earn FLOP through block rewards and fees. Validators check that the work is correct and hold memories for AI agents.

Hayes has called the token the missing payment system in what he terms the "agentic economy." He has also argued the real risk of AI is the debt accumulated in data-center construction, estimating back in June that about $1.5 trillion had been borrowed to fund AI infrastructure since November 2022.

His warning about fake FLOP tokens arrives while he still faces questions about his trading history. In June, his family office Maelstrom was accused of moving about $1.92 million worth of CARDS tokens to a market maker days after Hayes publicly promoted the project, Cryptopolitan reported.

Weeks earlier, on-chain investigator ZachXBT documented Hayes selling positions in tokens including HYPE, NEAR, Zcash (ZEC), and Worldcoin (WLD) within two weeks of endorsing them. Hayes responded that he "sold to a willing seller at a price."

Hayes has said the FLOP launch will be "100% fair" with no presale and no venture-capital allocation. Flop Labs has not published a whitepaper, tokenomics schedule, contract address, blockchain choice, test network, or anything a buyer could use to verify that claim.

The project's sequence is unusual: the airdrop is slated to happen before the chain that would host the tokens exists. When asked about the missing whitepaper, Hayes said the team was "still speaking with interested parties" and that infographics would start rolling out with tokenomics.

Maelstrom has said it will shut down by September, and BitMEX plans to close its exchange on September 23, 2026.

Hayes said to expect a "massive airdrop" in the fourth quarter of 2026, with the network's genesis block targeted for the first quarter of 2027. The project stresses neither date is final.