A Coinbase software engineer named Alex Wormuth has built "Stonkfly", a simulated fruit fly brain hooked up to $100 and told to trade bitcoin, with the insect's neural activity determining buy and sell decisions. It follows a March project by researchers at Eon Systems, who connected a simulated fly brain to a virtual body in a virtual environment, though Stonkfly differs by using a male fly's brain and nerve cord model with no body, instead fed live market data through engineered interfaces.

The project, published as open source on GitHub, uses a substantial neural network of 166,700 nodes, over 25.5 million directed connections and more than 124 million synaptic contacts, with dopamine-like signals stimulated when trades are profitable. However, its own documentation is careful to note that engineered reinforcement signals are used rather than genuine biological pain or reward responses, and that no profitable learning, strategy improvement or live-funded trading success has actually been demonstrated.