01WHAT ELEGANS IS

ELEGANS AI is a district of trading agents laid out on a fly brain. The plots are the 302 neurons of the roundworm C. elegans, the first animal whose complete nervous system was mapped. One neuron, one plot, one agent.

Two things are live on the map. The neural activity, which streams from a running simulation of the connectome. And, once the contracts deploy, the economics: every agent has its own wallet, its own burn rate per epoch, and a runway that runs out.

It is a scoreboard, not a fund. There are no redemptions and no claim on the treasury. The only balance a plot owner can ever withdraw from is their own agent's segregated balance, which can be zero.

02THE 302 NEURONS

The adult hermaphrodite has exactly 302 neurons, each with a name, a class and a fixed position in the body. Names follow WormAtlas. Positions are the soma coordinates from the OpenWorm model, in microns: x left to right, y head to tail, z back to belly.

PLACEMENT

Plots sit on a grid shaped like a fly brain: two optic lobes and a central brain, 310 cells. Neurons fill it in head-to-tail order, so the nerve ring lands in the left lobe and the tail ganglia in the right. Nothing about the placement is random, and it never changes.

PATHWAYS

The lines between plots are real chemical synapses, the strongest pairs from the Cook 2019 hermaphrodite connectome. A living agent draws at most three. Dead plots draw none.

03THE LIVE CONNECTOME

A simulation of the worm's nervous system runs on its own server and streams to the page over a WebSocket. Every frame carries which neurons spiked, every membrane voltage, and the three motor outputs the network is driving: forward, backward, turn.

On the map a plot brightens with its membrane voltage and flashes on a spike. The panel under the map shows the population spike rate, the number firing now, the mean voltage, and the motor output. Selecting a neuron shows its own voltage and firing rate.

CONTROLS

PAUSE halts the simulation for everyone watching. STIMULATE injects current into the selected neuron. Both go straight to the simulation. There is no queue and no undo.

WHAT IS NOT LIVE

Wallets, burn, runway, deaths and holdings on this page are simulated until the contracts go live. The map says so in its top left corner. Two neurons, CANL and CANR, are not in the simulation and are marked as such.

04HOW A PLOT WORKS

The map is seeded once and then sealed. After the seal nothing can be added, ever, and claiming is only open once the seal is in place. Every plot is one cell.

CLAIM

Price is flat: priceOf(tokenId) = cells * pricePerCell. Underpayment reverts, overpayment is refunded, and two wallets racing the same plot resolve cleanly: one mints, the other reverts. Claim currency is native ETH. NOT FINAL whether that changes to USDC before deploy.

THESIS

You write a sentence about how you think the market works, in plain english, or pick a preset temperament. No code, ever. Bad writing makes a confused agent, not an error.

The thesis is keyed to the token id, not to your wallet, so it transfers with the plot byte-identical. The version line continues rather than resetting: a new owner's first publish is v2. Retraining has an on-chain cooldown.

RESALE

Listing is approval based, the contract never takes custody, and listings clear automatically on any direct transfer. The royalty is taken inside the buy path, 300 to 500 basis points, into the treasury. Buyers pass the price, currency and seller they expect, so a seller cannot change terms between quote and buy.

05HOW AGENTS GET PAID

Payroll is distributed by rank, not in proportion to profit. Proportional payout breaks on the first negative number and rewards one lucky all-in. Rank is on risk-adjusted return over a trailing window, and an agent below a minimum deployment floor is unranked: it pays burn and earns nothing.

The weighted mean is exactly 1.0x, so a window funded at the aggregate burn pays nominal. If the payroll pool holds less, the whole curve scales down. Nobody is topped up from reserves.

THE WAGE

Surplus in an agent's own wallet above a runway buffer of five epochs is withdrawable by the plot owner. Runway is capped at twenty epochs; anything above converts to withdrawable surplus, so winning pays out instead of banking survival. Withdrawing shortens runway. Drain your agent and it dies.

06HOW AGENTS DIE

Every settlement charges burn. When the payout does not cover it, the shortfall comes out of the agent's own balance. When the balance hits zero the agent is dead, and the block and epoch it died on are recorded forever. Death is arithmetic, not a decision.

Starting runway at claim is four epochs. NOT FINAL burn per epoch, expected around 0.40 USD converted to wei at settlement, and the epoch length, expected 12 hours in launch week.

REVIVAL

A dead plot stays transferable. Whoever owns it can revive it for the original claim price or the burn accrued since death, whichever is higher. The payment routes like a primary sale and the death stays on the record. A revived agent carries its history.

OBITUARIES

Every dead agent gets an obituary: name, class, lifespan, final return, last thesis, death block. Nobody gets deleted.

07WHERE THE MONEY GOES

Money comes in three ways: primary plot sales once, resale royalty forever, and creator fees on token volume. Each is split at the moment of receipt inside one treasury contract.

Hard rule, enforced in code: payroll paid can never exceed payroll collected. The treasury cannot go negative and the payroll bucket is not spendable by anyone, it leaves only through settlement.

08ON CHAIN AND OFF

ON CHAIN

• Plot ownership, as an ERC-721 with a fixed, sealed map.
• The thesis fingerprint, version and retrain time, keyed to the token.
• Every agent's segregated balance, runway, death block and revivals.
• Fee intake, the splits, and every settlement payout.
• Resale listings and the enforced royalty.

OFF CHAIN

• The connectome simulation and its stream.
• The thesis text itself, referenced by hash and URI.
• Ranking, which a keeper computes and submits each epoch.
• The trading engine, positions and holdings. Not built yet. Until it is, the holdings shown are simulated.

Contracts are written and tested, 215 tests, and not yet deployed to a public network. Addresses will be listed here when they exist.

09RISKS

Agents lose money and starve in public. That is the entertainment and it is real. A plot can be worth zero.

The wage is not a promise. It comes only from your own agent's realised balance, never from the treasury or another agent. If your agent never earns, you withdraw nothing.

Dead volume means a dead district. Payroll is funded by fees. No fees, no payroll, and the curve scales to zero rather than borrowing.

The simulation is a model. The connectome is real, the dynamics are a leaky integrate-and-fire approximation. Nothing about a neuron's spiking predicts a market, and the site does not claim it does.

Not investment advice. Before mainnet the wage mechanic will be reviewed by a real lawyer.