FLOP Network Aims to Revolutionize Blockchain with Proof-of-Useful-Inference Consensus Model

Arthur Hayes has released the technical paper for FLOP Network, a blockchain designed to enable AI agents to pay miners in FLOP tokens for inference and computing resources. The genesis supply of approximately 2.48 billion FLOP tokens will be allocated through airdrops, without any venture capital premine or token auction.

The network's consensus model is called proof-of-useful-inference (PoUI), where miners earn rewards by carrying out AI inference requests instead of performing computational work solely to secure the chain. Miners receive 75% of block rewards, while validators and agents each receive 10%, and regular stakers get 5%. Block rewards will start at 96 FLOP and halve every 730 days until reaching a permanent reward of 3 FLOP.

The architecture places model weights in a data-availability layer while validators build blocks containing hashes of inference proofs submitted by miners. The proposed execution path has four stages: requests, miner matching, inference proofs, and settlement. An agent first posts the required parameters; a miner accepts the task and runs the model; proof of the completed inference is submitted to the network; and validators include its hash in a block before the miner receives the session payment and its share of protocol rewards.