Arthur Hayes shuts down links to FLOP meme tokens, airdrop still months away

Arthur Hayes, the cofounder of the crypto exchange BitMEX, clarified to his audience on Saturday that Flop Labs has issued no token, run no pre-sale, and put out no memecoin. 

He warns that anything trading under the FLOP name today is not the genuine token. 

Is the $FLOP token trading yet?

Arthur Hayes, the cofounder of the crypto exchange platform BitMEX, clarified through posts on his X account that Flop Labs has yet to issue a memecoin or any other token. He added he will announce the airdrop himself once it begins “in a few months” and flag the mainnet when it goes live next year.

Hayes announced roughly four days before his post that he was coming out of retirement to run Flop Labs as chief executive. 

FLOP, in Hayes’s words, will function as “food for your AI agent.” It is expected to be a native currency that autonomous software would spend on computing power, inference, and memory storage. 

Under the proposed design, miners will supply compute to run AI tasks and then earn FLOP through block rewards and fees in return. Validators will check to confirm that the work is done correctly and also hold memories for AI agents.

Hayes says the token will provide the missing payment system in what he calls the “agentic economy.” 

He also previously argued the real risk of AI is the debt collected in the process of data-center construction, estimating back in June that about $1.5 trillion had been borrowed to fund AI infrastructure since November 2022.

Why is there skepticism around Hayes’ project?

Hayes’ warning about possible fake FLOP tokens arrives while he is still facing 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 just days after Hayes publicly talked up the project, Cryptopolitan reported. 

Weeks earlier, on-chain investigator ZachXBT documented Hayes exiting positions in tokens like HYPE, NEAR, Zcash (ZEC), and Worldcoin (WLD) within two weeks of endorsing them. Hayes responded to these accusations by saying he “sold to a willing seller at a price.”

Hayes has repeatedly said that the launch of the FLOP token will be a “100% fair” with no presale and no venture-capital allocation. However, Flop Labs is yet to publish a whitepaper, tokenomics schedule, contract address, blockchain choice, test network, or anything at all that a buyer could use to confirm that claim. 

This controversial history is why a fair-launch pitch with rewards flowing to key opinion leaders draws extra scrutiny. The sequence of the FLOP project is also quite unusual, with the airdrop slated to happen before the chain that would host the tokens even exists.

When asked about the absent whitepaper, Hayes said the team was “still speaking with interested parties” and that infographics would start rolling out beginning with tokenomics. 

Notably, Maelstrom has announced that it will be shutting down by September, while BitMEX plans to close its exchange on September 23, 2026.

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