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