Arthur Hayes proposes building a spot and derivatives market for AI compute, exploring FLOP-based pricing for computational resources.

On October 27 that, according to the article "The Trifecta" by Arthur Hayes, he proposed establishing a compute market for AI agents through Flop Network, using FLOP tokens as the payment medium, and developing forward, futures, and perpetual contracts based on compute spot prices.

Hayes believes that the current market lacks a unified global compute pricing benchmark, and existing rental price indices for GPUs, CPUs, and TPUs, as well as pricing data for AI model tokens, have limitations. Flop Network plans to calculate compute prices based on the latency, computational load, and fees of inference tasks, and establish a reference benchmark through an open market.

In terms of derivatives design, the plan includes Flop Compute Units (FCUs) that allow advance booking of compute delivery within the next 30 days, quarterly cash-settled futures with Flop Reference Compute Rates (FRCRs) as the underlying asset, and perpetual contracts tracking this benchmark. The related products aim to help compute buyers lock in future costs and provide traders with hedging and speculation tools.

Hayes stated that the compute spot and forward markets should serve as the foundation for the development of related derivatives. However, the article primarily outlines the conceptual design and contract mechanisms of Flop Network, and does not indicate that the aforementioned market has been fully launched or that the related derivatives have been officially rolled out.