Coinbase Engineer Turns a Virtual Fly Brain Into a Crypto Trader

A software engineer at Coinbase has wired a digital copy of a fruit fly’s brain into a Bitcoin trading account. The open-source project is called Stonkfly. It shows the simulated brain a price chart and rewards profitable trades with a burst of virtual dopamine.

The fly never sees a single price number. How a Simulated Fly Brain Places a Trade Alex Wormuth published the code on GitHub alongside a public dashboard. The model runs 166,700 neurons and roughly 25.6 million connections between them.

Those figures come from a connectome, a published wiring map of an adult male fruit fly’s nervous system. Neuroscientists spent years building it. Wormuth pointed it at a candlestick chart instead.

Stonkfly draws that chart as a small image and splits it across the fly’s two simulated eyes. Light-sensing cells read the raw pixel colors. The brain then settles on buy, sell, or hold. Profit fires 15 reward neurons. A loss fires two that register something unpleasant.