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An exclusive interview with Arthur Hayes, co-founder of BitMEX and one of the most prominent figures in the cryptocurrency world. Simply put, an episode with a legend!
Hayes has not previously given interviews to media from the CIS region, making this conversation a unique opportunity to hear his views on the crypto market and beyond, straight from the source.
We discussed FLOP, his new project at the intersection of AI agents and blockchain, explored its key differentiator, the upcoming airdrop, and potential earning op...
What Arthur Hayes said
Written from the verified transcript and checked against it. Every figure links to the moment it was said.
Arthur Hayes discussed his new project, the Flop Network, which aims to create a currency for AI agents by rewarding compute contributions with Flop tokens. He emphasized that participation is free during testnet, with an airdrop in October, and compared it to Bitcoin in 2010. He declined to reveal whether he sold his ZEC, noting that's the point of Zcash. He advised focusing on projects with real clients and token buy-burn mechanisms. On BitMEX's shutdown, he explained that increased competition and a perfectly competitive market made it unprofitable, leading to a board decision to close it, returning all customer funds without any hack.
Key takeaways
Flop Network lets anyone contribute GPUs or laptops to earn Flop tokens, with a testnet airdrop in October.
Hayes compares Flop to Bitcoin in 2010, saying early participation is free and could become harder later.
BitMEX shut down because it became unprofitable in a perfectly competitive exchange market, but returned all customer funds.
Hayes advises focusing on projects with real clients and buy-burn tokenomics for the next cycle.
Hayes refused to confirm whether he sold his ZEC, citing Zcash's privacy.
Hey everyone. Today we're doing a quick podcast with Arthur Hayes. This guy is an absolute legend. This is that very exchange that started it all in 2018. Arthur, hey.
My very first question: I want to talk about your project. The project is called Flop. Can you briefly explain what it is? Why did you come up with it? Why aren't you just sitting there trading the market? And for example, how can we make money off this?
So yeah, I kind of came out of retirement to start this project called the Flop Network. So why? There's this awesome opportunity right now because we all believe in the AI agentic future. There's going to be all these agents running around doing all this stuff. The compute's super cheap. We can have them do all sorts of things. But right now they don't have a currency. There's no real accepted network for what the agents are going to use as their currency. So I saw an opportunity using blockchain and tokens: we can incentivize agents to use a currency we created out of thin air, which directly represents compute — floating-point operations per unit of time. So people can take their GPUs, anyone really, even if you just have your laptop, could contribute GPUs, process inference, just like Bitcoin. You earn this currency called Flop, and if agents start to use this currency, start to hold this currency, the Flop Network becomes extremely valuable. And this is the promise for those who get involved early: you don't have to buy anything, all you have to do is participate. There's an airdrop coming up in October. You can mine, you can validate, you can just have your agent use the network. You get Flop testnet tokens, use them in mainnet, and then they become liquid. And so this is a way that we all together, just like Bitcoin, can come together, build a network, get the agents to use our currency, and then get rich.
Cool, cool idea. I actually have a powerful PC that's practically sitting idle. I deployed some models on it, but I can wipe them and plug it into his ecosystem.
So obviously we can't guarantee how much money you're going to make. We posted a model on the internet that says, "Okay, tell us the type of chip you have," and it can give you an estimation of how much money you could make. Now, obviously, in the beginning, we think this is like Bitcoin in 2010. It's super early. It's uncertain exactly what this is going to be worth. And so it'll be easier to mine, it'll be easier to earn block rewards. If this is very successful, then it's going to become progressively harder. So maybe in a few months' time, a laptop is not enough. You need to maybe rent a GPU on one of these services to get an H100 or a Blackwell chip or something like that. But you can literally just rent GPUs from one of these data centers, pay by the hour, and mine Flop.
Will it be kind of like: people farm tokens, agents use them? Or maybe it has a special feature, like they're anonymous, or maybe some other trick up its sleeve? Like, is there any special angle to this project itself, or maybe some thought behind moving toward all this? Because people love privacy right now, and he loves ZEC too, as we well know. Did he sell his ZEC?
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Hayes, A. (2026, October 21). THE NEXT BITCOIN? ARTHUR HAYES’ AI PROJECT [Interview transcript]. INVEST ZONA. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3106965/
MLA
Arthur Hayes. "THE NEXT BITCOIN? ARTHUR HAYES’ AI PROJECT." INVEST ZONA, 21 Oct. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3106965/.
BibTeX
@misc{hayes2026_3106965,
author = {Arthur Hayes},
title = {THE NEXT BITCOIN? ARTHUR HAYES’ AI PROJECT},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, INVEST ZONA. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {oct},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3106965/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
