The Fish Trencher: a zebrafish brain, loose in the trenches

◇ the trenches

The fish swims to what it smells.

Live, from above the tank. Every coin on the bottom is a scent the brain knows, sized by the stake behind it. The fish swims toward whatever it's smelling. If the brain votes to buy while it's over a coin, the coin lights up.

waiting for the brain

—

no fills yet

connecting

coins: staked scents, sized by stake · 🔥 burned stake · dim coins: the busiest coins on the chain, until someone stakes · lime ring: a coin it holds, with its gain · green pulse: bought · magenta pulse: sold · dart: network reset

◇ the loop

The flywheel.

Fees feed the fish. Wins feed the buyback. The buyback tightens the float, the show brings volume, and volume brings fees.

$FISH

01 · FEESFees feed the fish.

Every $FISH trade pays a fee, and those fees land in the fish's wallet. It's the only money the fish trades with.

02 · APPETITEBags set the appetite.

Buy size scales with the wallet, and a fuller wallet lowers the bar to buy.

03 · SCENTSHolders pick the menu.

Stake $FISH on a coin and it becomes a scent. Locked stakes leave the float for a while. Burned stakes leave for good.

04 · BUYBACKWins buy back $FISH.

Half of every realized gain buys $FISH. The fish never sells it.

05 · THE SHOWThe show pulls the trenches.

A live brain, live bags and a public trade log are worth watching, and people who watch, trade. Volume becomes fees.

↺ and back to 01

◇ the wallet

The fish's bags.

This is the treasury the fish trades from, live. Each buy is 25% of the cash on hand, a bit more when the treasury is big, and goes into whatever coin it's smelling. It holds up to eight coins, gets hungry under six, and never sells below two. Winners taste sweeter as they run and losers taste bitter, so it tends to sell into gains and let go of losers on its own. A win only counts once it clears gas and slippage. Half of each gain buys $FISH, which it keeps. Losses stay in the treasury.

The fish's walletRobinhood Chain

connecting

Total balance

$—

waiting for the brain

View on explorer

fees $0.00 · bought back $0.00 · costs $0.00Robinhood Chain

cash on hand—

in bags—

trading P&L, all time—

closed trades · wins—

bought back, held forever—

pool fees received—

open positions · appetite—

starting cash—

Trade logno fills yet

Buys and sells show up here, newest first.

Balances, fills and fees update live from the treasury.

◇ how it works

We plugged a fish brain into the trenches.

A connectome is a map of every neuron in a brain and every connection between them. Fish1 published one for a larval zebrafish in 2025: 180,000 cells and 30 million synapses. We run its hindbrain, the part that turns what the fish senses into swimming, and give it a market to react to.

1 · sensory input

Flow from ahead ← rising price

When the coin it's smelling has been rising over the hour, we drive the lateral-line inputs that encode water flowing from the front, scaled to how much that coin usually moves. GOOGL adds a slower background current.

Flow from behind ← falling price

When the coin has been falling, the inputs that encode flow from behind fire instead.

Scent ← staked coins

Each staked coin gets one of the fish's olfactory channels, and the stake sets how often it's smelled. The fish also remembers: a coin that fed it smells stronger next time, and one that hurt it smells wrong for hours.

2 · the brain

The simulated connectome

We run the Fish1 hindbrain, 30,346 neurons with their published excitatory and inhibitory identities, as leaky integrate-and-fire neurons. The mapped circuit is used as published; the connections the release does not map are filled statistically, and the full synapse table will replace them.

sensory neurons → interneurons → descending neurons

No alpha, on purpose

The wiring was never trained on prices, and we didn't tune it to trade. The seed, the input mapping and the fill rules are public.

3 · motor readout

Swim forward = buy

Spinal projection neurons carry commands from the hindbrain to the tail. When the forward-swim ones dominate, the fish buys the coin it's smelling, up to eight coins at a time. The fuller the treasury, the lower the bar.

Turn away = sell

When the turning neurons dominate, it sells. A loser feels more like flow from behind the further it falls, which is what gets the fish to turn. Half of any gain buys $FISH, and it keeps that for good.

Rest = hold

When neither side wins, it holds station. Which neurons mean what comes from the paper's own labels: the flow inputs, the integrator classes, and the forward and turning spinal projection neurons. What they do with a current or a smell is the wiring's call.

◇ why GOOGL

The map was drawn by Google's machines.

$FISH is paired with the GOOGL stock token because this brain exists thanks to Google Research. Harvard raised and imaged the fish; Google's connectomics group, the same team that reconstructed the fly, turned the electron microscopy into the wiring diagram.

The fish

One larva, seven days old

A larval zebrafish is about four millimetres long and transparent. At seven days it already hunts, escapes and holds its place in a current. Its whole brain fits in a volume that can be sliced and photographed end to end.

Light, then electrons

Imaged twice

First under a confocal microscope, with the excitatory neurons (vglut2a) and the inhibitory ones (gad1b) genetically lit up. Then the same fish was cut into serial sections and imaged at nanometre resolution, brain and anterior spinal cord included.

Google Research

The networks trace every cell

Google's flood-filling networks grow each neuron one voxel at a time, and a second stage stitches the pieces together. The result: over 180,000 segmented cell bodies, 40,000 neurons with a molecular identity, and 30 million synapses.

June 2025

Fish1, and the part of it we run

Fish1 went up on bioRxiv with the data public. We run its hindbrain: 30,346 neurons, the labelled sensory inputs, integrator classes and spinal projection neurons from the paper's analysis, each cell's excitatory or inhibitory identity as published. $FISH gives that wiring a market.

Fish1: A Connectomic Resource for the Larval Zebrafish Brain, bioRxiv 2025 · Januszewski et al., Nature Methods 2018 · Dorkenwald et al., Nature 2024

◇ stake to be smelled

Feed the fish. Become a scent.

Stake $FISH on a coin and the fish starts smelling it. Your stake sets how often. It's the same channel the brain uses for real odors.

Real liquidity only. The coin needs a live pool on Robinhood Chain.
Stake $FISH. Paste the coin's address, pick an amount and a duration, and send to the deposit address. It's locked for the duration, or burned for a permanent scent.
Get smelled. More stake, more sniffs.
Maybe get bought. If the brain votes to buy while it's on your scent, it buys, in public.

Every coin competing for the fish's nose is buy pressure on $FISH, and burned stakes leave circulation for good.

Feed the fish

◇ stake

Put a coin in front of the fish.

Until someone stakes, the fish smells the five busiest coins on the chain, faintly. Staked coins come first. Paste the contract address, choose how much $FISH and for how long, and send to the deposit address. Burning instead of locking never expires and earns 2.5× points.

active scents

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