Arthur Hayes, cofounder of the crypto exchange BitMEX, told his audience on Saturday that Flop Labs has not issued a token, conducted a pre-sale, or launched any memecoin.

He warned that any token trading under the FLOP name today is not the real token.

His caution reflects a recurring hazard in crypto: when a high-profile project announces a token before it exists, lookalike tokens often appear on decentralized exchanges within hours, and with no official contract address to check against, buyers have little way to distinguish a counterfeit from the eventual real asset.

Is the $FLOP token trading yet?

Arthur Hayes, the cofounder of crypto exchange platform BitMEX, said in posts on his X account that Flop Labs has not yet issued a memecoin or any other token. He added that he will announce the airdrop himself once it begins “in a few months” and will flag the mainnet when it goes live next year.

Hayes said roughly four days before his post that he was coming out of retirement to run Flop Labs as chief executive.

In Hayes’s words, FLOP will function as “food for your AI agent.” It is expected to be a native currency that autonomous software would use for computing power, inference, and memory storage.

Under the proposed design, miners will supply compute to run AI tasks and earn FLOP through block rewards and fees. Validators will verify that the work has been completed correctly and will also hold memories for AI agents.

Hayes has said the token will provide the missing payment system in what he calls the “agentic economy,” a vision of machine-to-machine payments that a growing number of crypto projects are pursuing as AI agents take on more autonomous tasks.

He has also argued previously that the real risk from AI is the debt accumulated during data-center construction, estimating in June that about $1.5 trillion had been borrowed to fund AI infrastructure since November 2022.

Why is there skepticism around Hayes’ project?

Hayes’ warning about possible fake FLOP tokens comes as he continues to face questions about his trading history. In June, his family office, Maelstrom, was accused of moving about $1.92 million worth of CARDS tokens to a market maker just days after Hayes publicly promoted the project, Cryptopolitan reported.

Weeks earlier, on-chain investigator ZachXBT documented Hayes exiting positions in tokens including HYPE, NEAR, Zcash (ZEC), and Worldcoin (WLD) within two weeks of endorsing them. Hayes responded to those accusations by saying he “sold to a willing seller at a price.”

Hayes has repeatedly said the FLOP token launch will be “100% fair,” with no pre-sale and no venture capital allocation. However, Flop Labs has not yet published a whitepaper, tokenomics schedule, contract address, blockchain choice, test network, or any other information a buyer could use to verify that claim.

That background has drawn added scrutiny to the fair-launch pitch, especially with rewards expected to flow to key opinion leaders. The structure of the FLOP project is also unusual, with the airdrop scheduled before the chain that would host the token even exists.

When asked about the missing whitepaper, Hayes said the team was “still speaking with interested parties” and that infographics would begin rolling out starting with tokenomics. Until those materials include a verifiable contract address, there will be nothing on-chain to separate the eventual genuine token from the impostors already trading under its name.

Notably, Maelstrom has announced that it will shut down by September, while BitMEX plans to close its exchange on September 23, 2026.