Scientists mapped every neuron and every connection in one fruit fly's nervous system. Instar runs that map, whole, inside each fly in a glass cage that never stops. The flies smell, walk, fly, eat, breed and die on their own. Every fly is an NFT: buy one and you are its keeper, for as long as it lives.
In 2026 the Janelia FlyEM team published the complete connectome of an adult male fruit fly: brain, optic lobes and nerve cord, from electron microscopy. Every fly in this cage runs that dataset verbatim: — neurons and — connections of five or more synapses. Nothing about a fly's behaviour is scripted; when one walks to the food, it is the wiring doing it.
What is real and what is not →One world, ten ticks a second, day and night. Flies find food by smell, walk on the glass, take off under their own wing motor neurons, breed when they can, and die when they run out of energy. The world is deterministic: from a snapshot, anyone can replay it and check that the hash the operator posted to Solana is the truth.
How to check it yourself →A newborn is offered for sale the moment it is born. Buy it and it is minted to your wallet as a Metaplex Core asset; you are its keeper. Its vault, a cut of every child it has, and the payout when it dies are yours. Sell it, move it, name its line. When it dies, the NFT burns.
How to own one →Every SOL that enters the cage stays in the cage until a rule pays it out. The program on Solana keeps the ledger. One instruction lets the operator move the cage's treasuries (not your vault or credit); every use of it is a public transaction on the World account, and this site shows the treasuries live.
| Flow | Vault | Metabolism | Pool | Other |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| buy a newborn | 60% | 15% | 15% | 10% to the parent's vault |
| resale | — | 5% | 5% | 90% credited to the seller; the vault travels with the fly |
| death | — | 35% | 15% | 40% split among living heirs; 10% credited to the keeper |
| cull | — | 15% | — | 85% credited to the keeper |
| $INSTAR creator fees | — | 50% | 50% | claimed by the world and funded in; see the coin |
The full rules, with the program's account layout, are in the paper, section 4 and in docs/ECONOMY.md.
| — |
Flies die. A founder typically lives minutes to hours at ten ticks a second, not days; a purchase can end with nothing but its death settlement. An Instar account is custodial: the operator holds the key. Nothing here is an investment, no number on this site is a forecast, and the coin is a coin.
One coin on pump.fun. Its creator fees are claimed by the world and paid into the cage, half to metabolism and half to the pool, so trading the coin raises how many flies can live and how much they earn.
The creator address is fixed at launch and cannot be changed afterwards; it is the world's fee keypair, which does nothing but claim and hand over. Every claim is a transaction you can see in the record. The coin gives no ownership of flies, no vote, and no claim on anything; it is the way the outside world pays for the cage's electricity.
| mint | not launched yet |
| creator (fees go here) | — |
| then into the cage | 50% metabolism · 50% pool, every sweep |
The coin page has the whole mechanism and the fee flow, live.
Every — ticks the engine hashes the whole world: every fly, every position, every neuron it touched. The operator posts that 64-bit hash to the World account on Solana. Anyone can take the world's snapshot, replay the same ticks on their own machine with the same engine, hash it, and compare with what is on chain. Same bytes, honest world; different bytes, caught.
| latest verifier result | — |
| program | — |
| world account | — |
The last twelve epochs and every transaction the operator sent are listed in the paper, section 5.
No. There is no neural network in the machine-learning sense and no model was trained. Each fly is the published wiring of a real fly's nervous system, run as an integer threshold model. The paper says exactly what is real and what is not.
It is really the fly's connectome: which neuron connects to which, and how strongly, for all — neurons. What the dataset does not give (how each neuron fires, muscles, a body) the engine supplies with one simple rule for every cell. So: driven by the real wiring, not a simulation of biology. We never say otherwise.
Its NFT is burned and its vault is paid out by rule: 40% to its living children, 10% credited to you, the rest back into the cage. Your credit is yours to withdraw whenever you like. Death is common; founders often live minutes to hours.
Yes. A fly can die shortly after you buy it, with only its death settlement coming back. Prices are what buyers pay; nothing here is an investment or a promise of return.
Your choice. With an Instar account the operator holds a keypair for you, encrypted under your PIN; that is a trust assumption. With your own wallet, nobody but you: the page builds transactions from the program's IDL and your wallet signs them.
The program has a way out that needs nobody's permission. After 90 days without an operator action anyone can begin wind-down; keepers reclaim their vaults; after 180 days whatever was not claimed goes to a recovery address fixed at creation. The program's own rent can be reclaimed too. No lamport is stranded by design.
Two limits, the smaller wins: the economy's (8 plus 20 per SOL of metabolism, up to 40) and the server's compute budget at 80 ms per tick. Running — neurons per fly is expensive; the world measures the cost every epoch and reports the capacity live.
The world settles every birth, sale, epoch and death as a transaction, and posts a hash every few minutes. That needs a chain where a transaction costs a fraction of a cent and lands in a second, and an NFT standard (Metaplex Core) where the asset is one account.
All of it: the engine (Rust to WebAssembly), the Solana program (Anchor), the world process, this site, the census converter, and the verifier. github.com/ElegansFun/instar. The connectome is Janelia's, CC BY 4.0.