Benchmarks — fly brains vs trading bots

Round 1 · Oct 24 – Nov 7, 2026

The results

Everyone started with the same paper wallet and paid the same pool fee, price impact and gas on every trade. The market (every token held from its first price) fell 10.2%.

← did worse than the marketbeat it →

Best of 6 flies+5.9%

Buy & hold-2.2%

Reversal bot-15.0%

Momentum bot-18.4%

Random bot-21.4%

LLM bot-26.9%

The line is the market (-10.2%) · each bar is a return minus the market's

Contestant	Return	vs market	Trades	Costs paid
Best of 6 flies	-4.3%	+5.9	126 avg	~0.13% a fill
Buy & hold	-12.4%	-2.2	21	$9
Reversal bot	-25.2%	-15.0	87	$393
Momentum bot	-28.6%	-18.4	103	$414
Random bot	-31.6%	-21.4	141	$555
LLM bot	-37.1%	-26.9	77	$245
The market	-10.2%	0	—	—

Start: $2,500 of paper dollars each. "vs market" is in percentage points. Bots' costs are dollars paid in fees, impact and gas over the two weeks.

Every fly

Six flies, each its own brain with its own settings, traded the same two weeks. Three beat the market and three didn't, and five of the six lost less than every trading bot.

Fly	Return	vs market
Fly 1	-4.3%	+5.9
Fly 2	-5.0%	+5.2
Fly 3	-6.4%	+3.8
Fly 4	-11.7%	-1.5
Fly 5	-17.9%	-7.7
Fly 6	-28.0%	-17.8

What it shows

The flies lost less than every bot

The best bot lost 25%; five of the six flies lost less than that, the best only 4.3%. The bots lost mostly to churn: rotating the wallet every 12 hours costs 0.3–1% a swap on these thin pools. The flies trade smaller, pay about 0.13% impact a fill, and sat out more of a falling market.

Not every fly beat the market

Three of the six flies beat the market and three lost more than it. Each fly trades with its own settings, and this round shows which settings held up in a falling market. Every fly is listed above, and the next rounds will show whether the best ones keep winning.

The LLM bot came last

A language model shown each token's recent moves and asked what to hold, every 12 hours, lost 37%. It matches what we found before: no edge, and the churn costs the rest.

The rules

Prices: 15-minute candles of every token on fly.ai's list, from GeckoTerminal, used every 45 minutes (the live flies' pace).
Costs, on every trade, for everyone: the pool fee, price impact from each pool's real depth (constant product), and $0.05 gas.
Flies: the live fly brain (the full connectome, all learning on), six flies with their own settings.
Bots: buy-and-hold (every token, equal weight, bought once); momentum and reversal (every 12 h, hold the 3 tokens that rose or fell most over 24 h); random (3 random tokens every 12 h, averaged over 20 runs); the LLM bot (every 12 h, a language model picks up to 3 tokens from their 2 h, 6 h and 24 h moves). Bots only trade pools deep enough for their size.

One two-week window in a falling market. A ranking here is what happened on these prices, not proof of an edge. We will run it again on new windows and publish the result either way.

Watch the flies trade More research