The Trench Fly: a fruit-fly brain, loose in the trenches

◇ the trenches

The fly walks to what it smells.

Live, from above. Every coin on the floor is a scent the brain knows, meaning someone staked it, and it's sized by the stake. The fly walks toward whatever it's smelling. If the brain votes to buy while it's on a coin, the coin lights up.

waiting for the brain

—

no fills yet

connecting

coins: staked scents, sized by stake · 🔥 burned stake · dim coins: the busiest coins on the chain, until someone stakes · lime ring: a coin it holds, with its gain · green pulse: bought · magenta pulse: sold · hop: network reset

◇ the loop

The flywheel.

Fees feed the fly. Wins feed the buyback. The buyback tightens the float, the show brings volume, and volume brings fees.

The Trench Fly, a fruit fly in a neural rig with candlestick charts in its eyes

$FLYWHEEL

01 · FEESFees feed the fly.

Every $FLYWHEEL trade pays a fee, and those fees land in the fly's wallet. It's the only money the fly trades with.

02 · APPETITEBags set the appetite.

Buy size scales with the wallet, and a fuller wallet lowers the bar to buy.

03 · SCENTSHolders pick the menu.

Stake $FLYWHEEL on a coin and it becomes a scent. Locked stakes leave the float for a while. Burned stakes leave for good.

04 · BUYBACKWins buy back $FLYWHEEL.

Half of every realized gain buys $FLYWHEEL. The fly never sells it.

05 · THE SHOWThe show pulls the trenches.

A live brain, live bags and a public trade log are worth watching, and people who watch, trade. Volume becomes fees.

↺ and back to 01

◇ the wallet

The fly's bags.

This is the treasury the fly trades from, live. Each buy is 25% of the cash on hand, a bit more when the treasury is big, and goes into whatever coin it's smelling. It holds up to eight coins, gets hungry under six, and never sells below two. Winners taste sweeter as they run and losers taste bitter, so it tends to sell into gains and let go of losers on its own. A win only counts once it clears gas and slippage. Half of each gain buys $FLYWHEEL, which it keeps. Losses stay in the treasury.

The fly's walletRobinhood Chain

connecting

Total balance

$—

waiting for the brain

View on explorer

fees $0.00 · bought back $0.00 · costs $0.00Robinhood Chain

cash on hand—

in bags—

trading P&L, all time—

closed trades · wins—

bought back, held forever—

pool fees received—

open positions · appetite—

starting cash—

Trade logno fills yet

Buys and sells show up here, newest first.

Balances, fills and fees update live from the treasury.

◇ how it works

We plugged a living brain into the trenches.

A connectome is a map of every neuron in a brain and every connection between them. FlyWire published one for an adult fruit fly in 2024. It's the wiring, not anything the fly learned. $FLYWHEEL runs that wiring and gives it a market to react to.

1 · sensory input

Sugar ← rising price

When the coin it's smelling has been rising over the hour, we drive its sugar-sensing neurons, scaled to how much that coin usually moves. GOOGL adds a slower background mood.

Bitter ← falling price

When the coin has been falling, the bitter-sensing neurons fire instead.

Scent ← staked coins

Each staked coin gets one of the fly's olfactory channels, and the stake sets how often it's sniffed. The fly also remembers: a coin that fed it smells stronger next time, and one that hurt it tastes bitter for hours.

2 · the brain

The simulated connectome

We run the FlyWire v783 wiring, 139,255 neurons and 2.5 million connections, as leaky integrate-and-fire neurons after Shiu et al. (2024). It's deterministic from a published seed and reproducible from public data.

sensory neurons → interneurons → descending neurons

No alpha, on purpose

The wiring was never trained on prices, and we didn't tune it to trade. The seed and the input mapping are public.

3 · motor readout

Forward = buy

Descending neurons carry commands from the brain to the body. When the ones for walking forward dominate, the fly buys the coin it's smelling, up to eight coins at a time. The fuller the treasury, the lower the bar.

Backward = sell

When the ones for backing away dominate, it sells. A loser tastes more bitter the further it falls, which is what gets the fly to let go. Half of any gain buys $FLYWHEEL, and it keeps that for good.

Groom = hold

When it would rather clean itself, it does nothing. Which neurons mean what comes from the connectome's cell-type labels. What they do with a taste or a smell is the wiring's call.

◇ why GOOGL

The map was drawn by Google's machines.

$FLYWHEEL is paired with the GOOGL stock token because this brain exists thanks to Google Research. Biologists imaged it, and Google's connectomics group turned tens of millions of microscope images into the wiring diagram.

2018

A whole brain, sliced and photographed

At HHMI Janelia, Zheng and colleagues sliced an adult fruit-fly brain into about 7,000 sections and imaged every one: roughly 21 million images, around 100 terabytes. It was the first complete adult fly brain captured at a resolution where you can see individual synapses.

2019

Google's networks trace every neuron

Tracing one neuron by hand takes days, and there are about 140,000 of them. Google Research's connectomics team, led by Viren Jain, had built flood-filling networks that grow a neuron's shape one voxel at a time. They ran them over the whole volume and produced the first automated reconstruction of a complete adult fly brain.

2020 to 2024

FlyWire proofreads it

Automated segmentations make mistakes, like neurons cut in two or merged with a neighbour. FlyWire, led by the Seung and Murthy labs at Princeton, put Google's segmentation online and had hundreds of scientists and volunteers correct it neuron by neuron, adding synapses and cell-type labels as they went.

2024

The connectome, and a model of it

The finished diagram, 139,255 neurons and about 50 million synapses, was published in Nature in October 2024. Grouped by neuron pair, that's the 2.5 million connections simulated here. In the same issue, Shiu and colleagues published a leaky integrate-and-fire model of the whole brain. $FLYWHEEL runs that model on that diagram.

Zheng et al., Cell 2018 · Januszewski et al., Nature Methods 2018 · Li et al., bioRxiv 2019 · Dorkenwald et al., Nature 2024 · Shiu et al., Nature 2024

◇ stake to be smelled

Feed the fly. Become a scent.

Stake $FLYWHEEL on a coin and the fly starts smelling it. Your stake sets how often. It's the same channel the brain uses for real odors.

Real liquidity only. The coin needs a live pool on Robinhood Chain.
Stake $FLYWHEEL. Paste the coin's address, pick an amount and a duration, and send to the deposit address. It's locked for the duration, or burned for a permanent scent.
Get smelled. More stake, more sniffs.
Maybe get bought. If the brain votes to buy while it's on your scent, it buys, in public.

Every coin competing for the fly's nose is buy pressure on $FLYWHEEL, and burned stakes leave circulation for good.

Feed the fly

◇ stake

Put a coin in front of the fly.

Until someone stakes, the fly smells the five busiest coins on the chain, faintly. Staked coins come first. Paste the contract address, choose how much $FLYWHEEL and for how long, and send to the deposit address. Burning instead of locking never expires and earns 2.5× points.

active scents

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