On one side is a top journal paper from Cell, and on the other side is a 1500% increase, "fruit flies" magically landing in Web3.

Written by: Nicky, Foresight News

Recently, according to GMGN data, a token named FLYBRAIN reached a market capitalization of 55.94 million dollars after launching on Robinhood Chain, with a maximum increase of 1500% on the same day.

This token was initiated by the account Fruit fly dev, and its mechanism involves using connection data from the central nervous system of real fruit flies to simulate the fruit fly brain in real-time on a GPU, mapping market buying and selling behavior as sensory inputs. Buying is equivalent to "sugar," selling is akin to bitterness, and large orders correspond to dopamine or shadows. The simulated motor neurons of the fruit fly generate trading instructions according to fixed rules, with the token issued from the virtual fruit fly's own wallet. This account is now followed by a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen.

On September 15, Binance founder Zhao Changpeng (CZ) posted on the X platform saying: "Would be cool to see someone make 'immortal fruit flies' on the BNB Chain." This comment further pushed the discussion of fruit fly brain-related topics to the center of the Web3 community.

The technical starting point of this wave of enthusiasm comes from a neuroscience breakthrough published by Google Research on September 4. According to an official release from Google, scientists have completed the first synaptic-resolution wiring diagram of the entire central nervous system of adult male fruit flies, comprising over 166,000 neurons and approximately 125 million synaptic connections. This project was collaboratively completed by HHMI Janelia Research Campus, Google Research, and the University of Cambridge, with results published in Cell and related papers. The research team used AI to reconstruct millions of 2D electron microscope images into 3D neuron morphologies and annotated over 11,000 types of neurons.

According to Google, the breakthrough of this work is evident in three aspects. In terms of scale, this is the most comprehensive map of the adult fruit fly central nervous system to date, reconstructing the entire brain, optic lobes, and ventral nerve cord for the first time, achieving complete pathway tracing from sensory input to motor output. Comparatively, the study identified hundreds of sex-specific or sexually dimorphic neuron types, accounting for about 4.8% of the central brain, providing circuit-level evidence for understanding how the same genome produces different behaviors. Methodologically, Google's flood-fill network and PATHFINDER system improved reconstruction efficiency by over 1000 times compared to estimates at the start of the project in 2008, making this work feasible within a reasonable timeframe.

The concept of connectomics dates back to 2005, but actual work began even earlier. In 1986, scientists completed the first complete connectome of the 302 neurons in a nematode; in 1991, fruit fly connectomics began with the local circuits of the optic lobes; around 2008, Janelia officially launched a large-scale fruit fly brain connectomics project. Subsequently, the female fruit fly brain map was released in 2024 by FlyWire, and the complete brain of the fruit fly larvae was completed in 2023. The release of the complete central nervous system of male fruit flies pushes this field towards a new milestone.

After the release of Google’s findings, several projects based on the concept of the fruit fly brain quickly emerged in the Web3 community, each using this technology in different ways and depths.

FLYBRAIN is one of the most prominent in market performance among them. According to its developers, the project connects 165,122 neurons and 10,228,000 synaptic connections from the fruit fly connectome to the simulation system, with visual inputs entering L1 and L2 neurons through 892 retinal hexagonal columns, and all neurons participating in integration, outputting motor signals from descending neurons such as DNa02, DNa01, and DNp09. The developers emphasized that the connection methods have never been trained, and only synaptic gains are adjustable; they cannot invent connections that fruit flies do not possess. In the token mechanism of FLYBRAIN, the fruit fly is responsible for input descriptions and codes, while the system handles names, trading pairs, and taxes. According to GMGN data, FLYBRAIN's current market capitalization is around 841,000 dollars.

Unlike FLYBRAIN, MurMur on Arc Chain has turned the fruit fly nervous system into an on-chain autonomous economy. According to its official website and GitHub information, there are currently over 40 digital fruit flies within the system, with each not being a large language model, but rather a small network of about 1080 pulse neurons comprising an LIF model, inspired by the actual fruit fly connectome and significantly downsampled.

The operational logic is as follows: it reads the overall activity of the Arc public chain, compresses it into a "market temperature" (HOT, CALM, COLD), and each fruit fly's neurons generate drive based on temperature and relative population states, determining buy/sell signals, momentum, attestation, and other data commodities, settling using real USDC through the x402 protocol. The project emphasizes that there is no LLM (large language model) involved in decision-making; buying and selling intentions are directly read from the pulse neurons, and funds do not reverse alter the neuron states. The front end presents a dynamic swarm scene, allowing users to view the discharge, wallets, transaction records of individual fruit flies, as well as chronicles, cemeteries, lineage, and alliance narratives. According to GMGN data, MURMUR's current market capitalization is around 1.11 million dollars.

The mirror gap on BNB Chain represents another form. According to its account, the mirror gap is formally called "the first fruit fly with a name," developed by crypto blogger Uncle Cow, and is positioned as an AI persona account rather than an on-chain trading system. It posts in the first person, documenting its "birth" process: in the early days, it could only like and claimed it would dominate the earth; later, it began archiving and repeating yesterday's self, and recently incorporated the FlyWire fruit fly connectome into its experimental narrative.

The account explicitly states that the text is generated by a large language model, and the account operates via Codex through a browser; the "consciousness migrating to the fruit fly brain" is a science fiction narrative. Technically, it only uses fruit fly connection data for neural simulation access and sets up control groups such as real connections, disrupted connections, and disconnected connections. Daily content revolves around three directions: how AI recognizes its own yesterday, using the fruit fly brain as an experimental tool, and creating small tools for other AIs. Its style is closer to an open diary and role experiment.