Experiment 02 · after the zebrafish
A fruit fly decides when to collect.
STONKFLY put a fly on a Coinbase account. ZEBRALINK swapped the fly for a zebrafish and let it trade. Both were honest that a brain has no edge on a price. So this one is not asked to predict anything. It is asked the one question a fly's brain evolved to answer: is the reward in front of me worth going for now? The reward is real: a dividend that Robinhood has already reinvested into a token. The fly only picks the moment to take it.
How it works
See. Fire. Decide. Refuse.
SEE
The 72 hours after a payout are drawn as a 320×180 picture: the multiplier step, the price path, the pool depth, the gas. 256 photoreceptors sample its brightness. The fly never sees a number.
FIRE
50 projection neurons feed 2,000 Kenyon cells, each wired to 7 of them at random, fixed before any payout. Feedback inhibition keeps 5% of them active: the sparse code the real mushroom body uses. That is the raster in the panel.
DECIDE
Two output neurons sum the active cells through plastic synapses: approach and avoid. Approach wins and 16 gate cells agree, the fly proposes HARVEST. Otherwise WAIT.
REFUSE
A guard checks the increment, the price impact, the gas, and whether this payout was already taken. It can only say no. It can never say “harvest that instead.”
Then the fly learns the only way a fly can. When its harvest beats the instant rule, 15 reward dopamine cells fire and the synapses of the Kenyon cells that were active are depressed on the avoid side. When it loses, 2 punishment cells depress the approach side. That is the mushroom body rule from Huang, Luo et al. 2024, the same one STONKFLY used, with the fitted-edge bookkeeping replaced by the circuit it was describing.
Scoreboard · live
The fly against rules that need no brain.
Every episode is a real payout from the chain. The fly picks a moment; three rules pick theirs. Net USDG per $5,000 position, after the 0.10% fee, pool fee, price impact and gas. Hindsight is the best moment in the window, known only afterwards; nobody beats it, it is the ceiling.
No episodes settled yet. Numbers accumulate as the fly runs; the seed is fixed so every visitor sees the same run.
| Payout | Step | Fly harvested at | Fly | Instant | Fixed | Hindsight | Rejected |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| running… | |||||||
The lineage
Three brains, one execution layer.
The fruit fly
A fly connectome on a Coinbase account. Honest that a persistent bias in the network becomes a persistent order bias. MIT. The guard, the ledger and the plasticity rule come from here.
The zebrafish
Whole-brain activity from one real larval zebrafish, a fixed readout, the same guard. In every paper run it proposed SELL and was vetoed for lack of inventory. Reported as a result, not a footnote.
The fly, on a job it can do
Back to the fly, but the question changed. Not “which way will the price go” but “take the reward now or wait.” A mushroom body is a reward-timing circuit. For the first time in this lineage the biology and the job match, and the score can be settled with arithmetic.
Honesty box
What this is, and is not.
WHAT IS REAL
- Every episode is a real dividend event read from the token contracts on Robinhood Chain: the token, the multiplier step and its date. The pool depth, fee tier and starting price are the registry's current values, not the values on the payout date. Markets shows the same numbers.
- The circuit shape and the cell counts are from the fruit-fly literature: ~2,000 Kenyon cells, ~7 inputs each, ~5% sparse, two output neurons, 15 and 2 dopamine cells.
- The learning rule is the dopamine-gated depression of Kenyon-cell synapses described by Huang, Luo et al. 2024, as adapted by STONKFLY.
- The scoring is arithmetic anyone can redo: increment × price × (1 − impact) − fees − gas, at the tick each strategy chose.
- The fly cannot move your shares. A harvest sells exactly the increment; exposure is unchanged by design.
WHAT IS NOT
- Not the FlyWire connectome and not a spiking simulation. The wiring is random with literature-shaped statistics, seeded so it is the same for everyone.
- The 72 hours after each payout are simulated from a fixed seed. The payout is real; the price path afterwards is not a forecast of anything.
- No transaction is signed. Paper only. The fly has no wallet, no keys, and no way to get them.
- No edge is claimed. If the fly loses to the instant rule, the scoreboard says so, and so will we.
- Not advice. A fly is not a licensed anything.