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

In his article "The Trifecta," Arthur Hayes proposes establishing a compute trading market for AI agents through Flop Network, using the FLOP token as a payment medium, and developing forwards, futures, and perpetual contracts based on spot compute prices. Hayes states that the market currently lacks a unified global benchmark for compute pricing, and existing rental price indices for GPUs, CPUs, and TPUs, along with AI model token pricing data, have limitations. Flop Network plans to calculate compute prices based on the latency, computational workload, and transaction fees of inference tasks, and will form a reference benchmark through an open market.