- Arthur Hayes proposes cash-settled futures and perps tied to AI computing power.
- Users can reserve compute up to 30 days ahead as tradable units on Flop Network.
- Quarterly futures are worth $1 per point and settle in dollars, not $FLOP tokens
BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes has published a plan for financial contracts that let traders bet on, or protect against, changes in the price of artificial intelligence computing power.
Hayes argues that no single global price exists for compute, the processing capacity AI systems use to answer requests. Indices that track chip or AI token prices are incomplete, he says, and only reflect compute indirectly.
A Market Built on a Token
His proposed fix is the Flop Network, which he unveiled this summer. Its token, $FLOP, can be exchanged for compute, measured in floating point operations per second. Every second the network produces a block with receipts showing miners completed AI tasks, and the time taken, work done and fee paid give a price of compute in $FLOP.
Anyone with a chip can earn $FLOP by completing AI requests, and anyone holding it can submit one. Hayes says that open access makes the price a global benchmark.
Booking Compute Ahead
Users could reserve compute up to 30 days ahead, and each reservation becomes a tradable unit that can be resold. An example is one petaFLOP delivered at 12:00 UTC in seven days.
- Coverage: The units cover AI inference, not training.
- Buyers: Bids must be fully funded.
- Miners: They must post a bond larger than their fee, and lose it if they miss delivery within 24 hours of expiry.
Contracts
- Quarterly futures: They expire at 12:00 UTC on the last Friday of March, June, September and December.
- Size and settlement: Each point is worth $1, and contracts settle in dollars.
- Perpetual swap: It has no expiry date and shifts funding payments between long and short traders.
Because the underlying market is priced in $FLOP while traders want dollars, the contract would be a “quanto” product, which needs a pricing adjustment for how the two move together. Market makers could copy long or short positions by rolling 30-day units, he wrote. Each AI model has its own market, so hedgers must hold the right mix.
Track Record
Hayes frames the plan as a possible third success. He says BitMEX invented the perpetual swap in May 2016, and that his 2023 essay “Dust on Crust” described the synthetic dollar later built by Ethena, whose USDe he says grew to over $15 billion in under 18 months. DefiLlama data shows that it has since fallen below $5 billion.
Additionally, Flop Labs’ page listed no testnet launch date as of mid-October, and the company targets genesis, the network’s first block, for the first quarter of 2027.
Related: Arthur Hayes Unveils FLOPs Tokenomics How Will Proof of Useful Inference Work?
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