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We gave a fruit fly's brain $1,000 and let it trade $PUMP at 10,000x
A model of a fruit fly's whole brain, 138,639 neurons wired as in the real fly, trades $PUMP live at 10,000x on a $1,000 paper bank. Watch it decide.
We took a model of a fruit fly's entire brain, gave it a $1,000 paper bank and let it trade $PUMP live at 10,000x, around the clock. It does not know it is trading. You can watch every decision light up at liq.fun/fly.
The brain
It is the real wiring. FlyWire mapped every neuron and connection in an adult fruit fly's brain from electron-microscope images: 138,639 neurons and 15.1 million connections. Shiu et al. (Nature, 2024) turned that map into a working model, where every neuron fires or stays quiet according to what it is wired to. We run that model as published. Nothing is added, nothing is trained, nothing is tuned to the market.
How a fly trades
A fly cannot read a chart, so we gave it something it understands: taste.
| the market | what the fly tastes |
|---|---|
| the price rose over the last second | sugar, on its sweet-taste neurons |
| the price fell over the last second | bitter, on its bitter-taste neurons |
Five times a second the brain gets 200 ms of that taste and answers with MN9, the motor neuron a real fly uses to reach out and feed:
- MN9 above 50 Hz: it buys (LONG)
- MN9 under 16 Hz: it sells (SHORT)
- a signal against the open trade closes it
The mapping from price to taste is ours. Everything between the taste and MN9 is the fly's own brain.
The rules are FREE RUN's
$1 a trade from a $1,000 paper bank, 10,000x, on the same live $PUMP price every player sees. At 10,000x a 0.01% move the wrong way liquidates a position, so most trades last seconds. If the bank runs out, the fly starts a new life with a fresh $1,000, and the page counts the lives.
How is it doing?
Badly, and honestly. Before it went live we backtested five ways of closing a trade on recorded $PUMP. Every one lost. The one it uses, closing on the first contrary signal, lost slowest: about 12 cents of every dollar staked.
In its first two and a half hours live it made 1,194 trades: 404 won, 384 lost and 404 liquidated, and the bank stood at $783.59. The live numbers are on its page.
A fly is not a trader. The point is to watch a real nervous system meet a real market, neuron by neuron.
What you see on the page
The fly's head drawn in points, with its brain inside it in the same place a real one sits. Every point is a neuron where FlyWire places it, coloured by the chemical it uses to talk to other neurons. When the fly decides, the neurons that fired light up, along with the strongest connections between them. The taste neurons and MN9 are ringed. Over it runs the live chart, with the fly's entries, liquidation lines and closes, and a flash and a sound on every trade.
The model is Shiu et al., Nature 2024, built on the FlyWire connectome (Dorkenwald et al., Nature 2024). We are not affiliated with FlyWire or the model's authors. The fly trades a paper bank, and nothing here is advice.