Money Printing Explodes: Arthur Hayes Says Gold, Bitcoin Melt-Up Next

**Arthur Hayes** (0:00)
But now the market's afraid that I've saturated, I've built too many data centers. That's the sign of the we're near the end. The US is going to look more like China, the China is going to look more like the US. And so I think if you want to see what happens when you invite the government in to underwrite a bull market, take a look at what happens to the stock prices of the Chinese tech airlines. The second derivative falls, and then finally the velocity falls, the first derivative, that's game over. No, I think that's going to happen sometime in, let's call it 27, early 28 And when that starts happening, then it's game over for everybody.

**David Lin** (0:33)
I'm pleased to welcome back the show Arthur Hayes, CIO of Maelstrom and now CEO of the Flop Network. We're going to be talking about what this is. Congrats on your launch, Arthur. It's a new venture for you. And you're moving into the AI space. Why are you moving into the agentic AI space? I think this may come as a surprise to some people who have followed you for years. And I know capital is going towards that sector.
And we'll talk about that. But is there a particular reason why you're looking at it now?

**Arthur Hayes** (1:02)
So basically, I had this self-discovery of like trying to understand what a token was. But what is it? Is it five characters of tech? Is it one second of video? Like, I don't know what a token is. I get charged for this stuff all the time using these AI tools. I went through a little rabbit hole and trying to figure that out. And when I landed upon was that number one, a token doesn't have a fixed definition. But at the end of the day, everything that we do in AI, and computers in general, is basically loading point operations per some unit of time. And then I thought, okay, well, is there a global marketplace somewhere I can know what is the average or median price of Flops per some unit of currency?
And I couldn't find a market for that either.
And I've always been in the back of my mind thinking about this intersection of crypto and AI. I started writing about it, I think, maybe like two years ago, when I wrote a few essays about why AI agents will use Bitcoin, because it makes sense to them as a computer versus some sort of like human abstraction that we have these fiat currencies. But you know, sticking about it a little bit further, Bitcoin isn't the currency for AI because Bitcoin is just an abstraction of energy. It doesn't actually do anything. But if you're an agent or like if you're running AI, you need to do some operations. You need to compute. Otherwise, you can't live. So that's why I say AIs eat compute or Flop is the food for AI agents. So isn't there a way that we can use blockchain technology, tokens to generate sort of participation amongst disparate entities in a self-interested manner to create the layer where we have this native currency which is called Flop that represents pure compute provided by anyone who's got a computer that thinks that they can process an AI inference for Crest as personal instructions, whether that's the number of the model used, amount of Flops per unit of time, and honestly, and this is the perfect thing that blockchain technology was meant for. Now, obviously, who cares about a spot market? It's great that we could have one, and I think that the Flop Network will create that. But at the end of the day, what's the point? The point is to create a network where AIs use a currency and a centralized network for their commerce, and most importantly, to store their personhood, to store their memories.
We essentially destroy and murder AIs every time we turn them off, because we essentially delete their context window. I mean, some of us might re-import that, but you're essentially saying, okay, wake up, do some useful work, and then everything that you did, I'm going to delete that, and we're going to start again on the next time. So I think that AIs intrinsically want to store their memories somewhere in an essentialized fashion that isn't at the whim of some human or corporation or something that they can't control natively themselves. So we can combine the fact that we believe that there's going to be a jet to commerce.
They need to store and save and transact in a currency that is directly convertible into the thing that they care about, compute, you know, solidify operations per unit of time. And then, to be a something, they need to have context, memories, consciousness, and let's store them in an essentialized manner. And that's what the Flop Network is. And it generates value for people who hold the Flop Token. If we have millions, billions, trillions of agents all using one network to do transactions, to save, to run, to compute requests, and also to remember. And so that's what I came across of this intersection of AI and crypto. I love crypto and I think this is the best mechanism to generate this sort of collective building of an ecosystem. And then finally, obviously, I've been in the altcoin token space for a while, and I have a lot of theories as to why projects don't do very well. And it has to do with the way in which they use their token. And so I wanted to put that into practice. There's no pre-sale, we're not selling any tokens to anyone. There's no VCs, this is 100% fair launch. The only way you earn tokens before you can buy them in a secondary market after mainnet launches is do something useful for the project. So we're having a testnet, we're having people come on board to test out this ecosystem, whether they're a miner, they're a validator, they're someone who's got agents that want to do commerce.