BitMEX Co-founder Arthur Hayes: Fiat Currency and Most Cryptocurrencies Are Unsuitable for Agents
Arthur Hayes, co-founder of BitMEX and Chief Investment Officer of Maelstrom, stated at Cointelegraph Connect in Seoul that fiat currency and most cryptocurrencies on the market are not suitable as currencies for AI agents. His judgment is that agents need a settlement unit that can be directly exchanged for computing power, rather than a currency created by human law.
Hayes concurrently serves as CEO of Flop Labs, naming the project FLOP, corresponding to floating-point operations per unit time. The argument is that there is currently no market that can efficiently exchange one unit of currency for a determined number of floating-point operations over a specific period. The Korean won or US dollar is suitable for humans to buy food and housing, while the survival resource for agents is computing power. Bitcoin "does nothing," and stablecoins are still tied to fiat currency and have freeze attributes.
In an earlier interview, he mentioned that the value of fiat currency is determined by a few people, and financial officials can inject money into dollar accounts; computers do not understand this underlying sociology. The Flop Network is designed as a computing power spot market: miners provide verifiable reasoning, validators settle, and tokens pay for reasoning and are used to store memory on a censorship-resistant network. It is promoted as airdrop-style launch without pre-sales or venture capital quotas, claiming consensus has useful reasoning proof.
Contrasting solutions are already in progress: Coinbase's x402 allows agents to pay stablecoins directly via HTTP, with Coinbase's AI product head stating that about 99% of observable agent payments are made in USDC. Visa and Mastercard are modifying existing networks, while Circle is testing small payments. In tests by the Bitcoin Policy Institute on 36 models, there is a general preference for Bitcoin at about 48%, stablecoins for payment scenarios at about 53%, with no model selecting fiat currency as the top choice.
The buying pressure comes from agents about to make large-scale mutual payments and public chain projects wanting to seize unit accounts; the selling pressure is Hayes turning macro narratives into his own token network. Funds are shifting from stablecoin payment experiments to speculation on "computing power as currency." The event is driven by this conference in Seoul focused on Web3 and AI. Beneficiaries are projects that can turn reasoning pricing rights into tokens; those under pressure are agent infrastructures that can only receive payments in fiat currency accounts or freezeable stablecoins.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Hayes has transitioned from BitMEX trading to macro essays, and now to being a CEO. While writing about the debt bubble in AI infrastructure, he expresses confidence in the agent economy, reasoning that governments will not allow data centers to shut down, leading to a collapse in wholesale computing prices, making agents operational with cheap computing power, which requires a currency that can directly purchase floating-point operations. Maelstrom manages his personal funds, while Flop handles the productization of this narrative. This is a trade of commentary rights for issuance rights.
The capital path is not to create another exchange but to first define the food for agents as FLOP, then allow miners and validators to turn reasoning into a settlement commodity. Airdrops replace venture capital to make the holder structure resemble early Bitcoin rather than a fund table. The motivation is clear: whoever first becomes the quoting unit for agents will collect minting taxes in machine mutual payments. Resources are shifting from expectations of chip oversupply to network tokens that do not yet have daily active users.
Similar positions include Bitcoin relative to the gold standard, stablecoins relative to cross-border dollars, and Filecoin relative to storage. Hayes rewrites storage logic into reasoning logic. The industry stage is very early for agent payments: measurable flows are still on dollar stablecoins, and computing currency is still stuck in speeches and token designs. This is narrative expansion, not a completed unit replacement.
This is a prelude to the transfer of pricing power. The price of human currency is determined by interest rates and fiscal policies, while the price of agent currency should be determined by the spot supply of floating-point operations per second. The mechanism is that software without lawyers and bodies will not understand central bank balance sheets but will choose the inputs with the least friction and the most longevity. Whether the transfer can occur depends on whether reasoning can be standardized and measured, rather than on what is said on stage.
ABAB News · Law of Cognition
Whoever's survival resource is computing power will not first choose central bank currency.
Stablecoins are suitable for human settlements but do not automatically mean they are suitable for machine longevity.
Those who first define the measurement unit are qualified to collect the next round of minting taxes.