A slab of a mouse's visual cortex, kept running on a bench and trading stock tokens on Robinhood Chain. Its neurons, their shapes and every synapse between them are real, taken from one cubic millimetre mapped in MICrONS, Nature 2025. What it earns is pumped inside a Zcash address that anyone can watch and nobody can spend.
128 of the cells, one per row. Every dot is a spike. The cursor moves left to right, writing each new tenth of a second over the oldest column. The top rows are the voters of the stock being heard, and their spikes turn red while it is heard.
| stock | shares | value | since bought | held |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| nothing held | ||||
| channel | price | 1 min | in nA | fired | usual | x | status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AAPL | |||||||
| MSFT | |||||||
| NVDA | |||||||
| AMZN | |||||||
| GOOGL | |||||||
| META | |||||||
| TSLA | |||||||
| SPY | |||||||
| ZEC (chloride) |
A one minute move of a quarter of a percent is one unit of current. Three quarters of a percent saturates. Listeners get the current; voters are counted; the field only hears through its synapses. When ZEC rises, the inhibitory cells fire more and the slab goes quiet. When ZEC falls, they let go.
| channel | listeners | voters | field | first listener | first voter |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AAPL | |||||
| MSFT | |||||
| NVDA | |||||
| AMZN | |||||
| GOOGL | |||||
| META | |||||
| TSLA | |||||
| SPY | |||||
| ZEC |
| hop | what | status |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | usdg to eth on robinhood chain | |
| 2 | canonical bridge to ethereum, seven days | |
| 3 | eth to zec through near intents | |
| 4 | the note lands with a memo |
Every night at 21:00 UTC, half of the gain above the mark is pumped inside. The pump takes seven days to cross. Anyone can watch the inside with the viewing key on the membrane page.
The cell with the most spikes in the last hour, patched. Scale bar 200 ms by 5 mV.
Real. neurons from the MICrONS cubic millimetre of mouse visual cortex: their reconstructed shapes, their cell types, their positions and the synapse pairs between them. The prices are Chainlink feeds on Robinhood Chain. The inside balance is read from the Zcash chain with a viewing key.
Ours. The neuron model, leaky integrate and fire with constants from a whole brain fly model, and every synapse made stronger than life because the slab sees only a few dozen of each cell's thousands of inputs. Which cells hear prices, which ones vote, the rule, the chamber, the pipette, the pump and its route. And the account: one address on Robinhood Chain with no more in it than it shows.
| fact | value |
|---|---|
| volume | |
| cells | |
| neurons | |
| synapses | |
| functional rois | |
| functional neurons | |
| release | |
| released | |
| mouse age |
| fact | value |
|---|---|
| tau m | 20 ms |
| tau s | 5 ms |
| v rest | -52 mV |
| v reset | -52 mV |
| v th | -45 mV |
| t ref | 2.2 ms |
| r m | 10 MOhm |
| dt | 0.1 ms |
| w per synapse | 0.275 mV |
| scale | 8 |
| fact | value |
|---|---|
| cells | |
| pairs | |
| synapses | |
| per pair | |
| no input | |
| no output | |
| exc pairs | |
| inh pairs |