Coinbase Engineer Connects Simulated Fruit Fly Brain to Bitcoin Trading

A software engineer at Coinbase created an open‑source project named Stonkfly that links a simulated fruit fly brain to a Bitcoin trading account. The digital brain, modeled on a published connectome of an adult male fruit fly, contains about 166,700 neurons and roughly 25.6 million synaptic connections.

How the simulated brain trades

Stonkfly presents a candlestick price chart as a small image split between the fly’s two simulated eyes. Light‑sensing cells read the raw pixel colors, and the neural network decides to buy, sell, or hold. Successful trades trigger 15 reward neurons that release a virtual dopamine signal, while losing trades fire two neurons that signal an unpleasant outcome. Trading fees are treated as losses.

Operational limits

• Runs on paper money by default, starting with $100.
• Live mode caps each order at $10.
• Limits trading attempts to 24 per day.

Engineer’s perspective

The creator, Alex Wormuth, emphasizes that the experiment does not prove that the simulated brain learns to trade profitably. He notes that synaptic changes alone do not establish successful trading behavior.

Current performance

At the time of reporting, the public dashboard showed no completed trades. Bitcoin was trading near $77,286, up 0.6% on the day.