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. Trading fees count as losses. The fly cannot borrow or bet on a falling price, which puts it ahead of many AI bots trading stocks.

The Creator Says It Proves Nothing

According to the Coinbase engineer, the experiment does not show everything.

“Synaptic changes do not establish that it learns to trade profitably,” Alex Wormuth said.

The program runs on paper money by default, starting with $100. Live mode caps each order at $10, and limits attempts to 24 per day. The public dashboard still showed zero completed trades on Saturday.

That caution lands differently in a falling market. Bitcoin (BTC) traded near $77,286 on Saturday, up 0.6% on the day but far below its peak.

The real question is not whether the fly makes money. It is whether a mapped brain rewires itself for a reward evolution never gave it.