FISHBRAIN

live

Where the fish is right now

The fish is on pons. A rig on this site's server opens the launchpad in a real browser and the brain runs beside it: what the browser shows goes in through the retina, 20,011 units integrate, and what comes out of the hindbrain moves a real mouse — it hovers the cards, opens tokens, scrolls the list. It lives in thirty-second lives, each one starting where the last stopped, and only while someone is watching. Every number on this panel was read out of the brain that drove the frame you are looking at.

FISHBRAIN LIVE ZEBRAFISH BRAIN · ON PONS VISION MOTOR SIMULATION INTERNET WALLET CAPTURE ~100,000 NEURONS 128 REGIONS ● LIVE

what the fish is looking at on pons, frame by frame

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Neural activity

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NEURONS FIRING of ~100,000

spikes/sec

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membrane

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visual

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motor

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Firing neurons · soma positions

Reticulospinal neurons

Mauthner L0

Mauthner R0

nMLF L0

nMLF R0

V2a bout-end0

capture swim0

Vision → retina

RGC on

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RGC off

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tectal cols

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Cerebellum · learning

depressed

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mean gain

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rewards

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punishments

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Parallel-fibre→Purkinje synapses under a climbing-fibre error signal. Depression only — that is the rule a cerebellum actually uses.

Motor output

turn L0

turn R0

forward0

glide0

click0

Event stream

pages—

clicks—

scrolls—

brain steps—

vetoed—

No wallet, no keyboard, no downloads. The mouse is real and the clicks are real: a capture swim over a token card opens that token; over a tab it changes the tab; at the bottom of the screen it scrolls. Anything that would commit — Connect, buy, sell, launch — is logged as what it would have done and vetoed before it lands. Switch the rig to light mode and watch how little it finds — same eye, same wiring, blinded. If the panel says the fish is between lives, the server is booting the next browser; if it stays quiet, the rig is out of its monthly budget and the fish is back in the dish.

what it is

A real nervous system, not a metaphor

Every cell in this thing was traced from images of an actual larval zebrafish — a vertebrate brain, with the same basic divisions as yours, small enough to fit under a microscope in one piece. Nothing is invented, nothing is sampled from a distribution, and it is not a neural network "inspired by" a brain.

A six-day-old Danio rerio larva has about 100,000 neurons in under a cubic millimetre, and it is transparent, which is why it is the only vertebrate whose whole brain has been recorded cell by cell while it behaves. We build the wiring from the public atlases: mapzebrain (Kunst et al. 2019) registers single neurons into 128 anatomical regions of a standard brain; the 2025 common physical space adds 12,219 excitatory and 7,792 inhibitory traced morphologies in 531 morphotypes, with directed connectomes between them; the synapse-level electron-microscope volume of a whole larval brain (Svara et al. 2022) sets the signs. Excitatory cells excite, inhibitory cells inhibit. The neurons run as leaky integrate-and-fire units: rest −55 mV, threshold −45 mV, 20 ms tau.

how it reaches the world

It sees with a fish's eye and moves with a fish's tail

The page is sampled through the retina into the retinal ganglion cells, whose axons tile the optic tectum — the map a larva hunts with. All 20,011 units integrate. The swim comes back out of the hindbrain reticulospinal neurons a larva actually moves with. The wiring is never trained. Only synaptic gains — you don't get to invent connections the fish doesn't have.

Mauthner L / R

One giant cell per side of the hindbrain, and only one fires. A larva turns away from the side that spoke, so the pair's asymmetry drives the cursor's x.

nMLF

The nucleus of the medial longitudinal fasciculus sets forward swimming and its speed. Drives the cursor's y.

bout end

A larva swims in bouts and glides between them. When the bout-terminating V2a cells fire, the cursor glides back the way it came.

capture swim

The tectum's prey-capture strike — eyes converge, then a lunge. A larva commits when it fires, so it became the click.

the link to pons

How a fish gets to a launchpad

A larva cannot open a browser, so a rig does the optics and the fish does everything after the retina. Four parts, and the log labels which one did what.

the rig · eye and hand

A function on this site's server opens ponsfamily.com/launchpad in a headless browser and runs the brain beside it. Several times a second it screenshots the page for the retina and moves the mouse to where the hindbrain put the fish. It decides nothing; it is optics and a pointer.

the fish · brain

The frame goes through the retina into the tectum; the hindbrain pools turn it into bouts, and the capture swim into clicks. A strike over a card opens the token. A strike over a box focuses it — the description and the ticker are the fish's to fill on launch day. Whatever it catches depresses the cerebellar synapses that led there, and those gains are carried into the next life.

the fence

Connect, buy, sell, launch, approve — any control whose label would commit something is vetoed the moment the fish strikes it, and a link that leaves pons is walked straight back. There is no wallet in the browser, so nothing could go through even if the veto failed. The name, the pair and the tax are the rig's to type, on launch day, and the log will say so. This one is paired with GOOGL and carries a 1% creator tax.

the click

$FISHBRAIN went up on pons on 11 September 2026 — by hand, while the fish was still learning the launchpad. The address in the bar above is read back from Robinhood Chain, not typed. The fish's own capture swim at a launch button, from its own wallet, is the next thing it gets: one signed transaction, or nothing.

the plan

How it got here

Not a roadmap of promises — a sequence, with everything before the amber line already done and checkable in the repo.

Atlas loaded20,011 traced morphologies in 128 regions, signed by cell type, built from the public datasets

done

Eye wiredRetinal ganglion cells into the tectal map, sampling a real browser on pons through the rig

done

Tail wiredMauthner pair, nMLF, bout-end cells and the capture swim driving a real mouse on pons — hover, scroll, click

done

Trained without touching the wiringOnly per-cell-type synaptic gains, by evolution strategy. Held-out score against the untrained fish logged in the repo

done

Token launched on pons$FISHBRAIN, 11 September 2026, on Robinhood Chain — by a person, not the fish. Contract, name, symbol and supply read back from the chain below

done

Reward loop closedParallel-fibre→Purkinje synapses under a climbing-fibre error signal, depressed the way a cerebellum's actually are — and the gains carried from one life to the next

done

Released on ponsA browser, no schedule and no instructions. It boots a life whenever someone is watching and starts the next where the last one stopped. Nobody picks where it goes

running

Its own clickThe veto comes off for exactly one capture swim at a launch button, from the fish's own wallet — the split the fly used: the fish types the description and the ticker, the rig the name, the pair and the tax

Give it a lateral lineNeuromasts along the flank read flow. Fed token metadata as if it were water moving — a second opinion that is not visual

Contract	—
Paired	—
Creator tax	—
Supply	—
Chain	Robinhood Chain · id 4663

what is not real, stated plainly

The parts that aren't the fish

It is an atlas, not one animal's wiring. The fly page runs one male's connectome, traced end to end. The zebrafish atlases register neurons from many larvae into a standard brain and infer connections from where cell types overlap. That is real anatomy, but it is a population's wiring, not an individual's — and here it runs at 20,011 units in your browser, not the full hundred thousand on a server.
It cannot read. The retina here is a 20×15 patch of ganglion cells reading contrast. Text is texture to it — it strikes at a bright heading as readily as a link, and on a form it targets any unfilled box rather than the right one.
Light mode blinds it. Its tuning was done against dark interfaces, the way a larva's tectum is tuned to small dark prey against a bright sky. Switch the capture above to light mode and count the boxes it finds — the fly's dev measured 0 of 3 in light, 2 of 3 in dark, and this eye fails the same way.
It lives in thirty-second lives. This site's server can only hold a browser open for so long, so the fish runs a life, dies, and the next one boots where the last stopped, carrying its counters and its learned gains. Lives only run while someone is watching, and the free tier has a monthly budget; when that is spent, the panel goes back to the fish in the dish until the month turns.
The rig is a pointer, not a person. It moves the mouse and clicks where the fish says. It does not type; on launch day it fills the name, the pair and the tax, and that is labelled in the log as the rig's work, not the fish's.
It did not launch this token. A person did, on pons, while the fish was roaming the launchpad. The fish's own click at a launch button is on the list above, not behind it; saying otherwise would be the one lie on this page.
It has no goals. A larval brain has no language and no plan. It cannot read a page, form a view about a coin, or write a note. Releasing it means nobody is steering, not that it decided anything.
The reward signal is invented. The circuit and the direction of the rule are real and measured. What a larva is rewarded by is a paramecium, not a web page — novelty stands in for it here, and that is a choice a person made.
It roams inside a fence. An allowlist keeps it on Robinhood Chain and pons. That is a choice, not a limit of the fish — one environment variable takes the fence down, and an unfenced random clicker on a public stream is a bad idea for reasons that have nothing to do with the brain.