One cell. One network. Every buy feeds it.

Physarum polycephalum is a slime mould: a single yellow cell with millions of nuclei and no brain. It spreads over the agar as a web of veins, finds food, keeps the paths between food sources and lets the rest dry up. Given oat flakes in the shape of the cities around Tokyo, it grew a network close to the real railway.

1. A buy lands. Its size in ETH picks the food: a yeast speck, an oat flake, up to a golden truffle at 0.4 ETH and more.
2. The scent spreads. Food gives off a gradient through the agar. The front of the blob turns towards it.
3. The blob finds it. Its time-to-find is logged. The food is covered and slowly eaten.
4. It gets wired in. Once a vein joins the food to the main body, the food counts as part of the network.
5. The blob grows. Every unit eaten becomes biomass. Veins to empty spots fade and are reabsorbed.
6. It fruits. When the biomass is high enough, sporangia rise from the veins and release spores into new dishes.

The dish runs in your browser. Every visitor has their own dish; the market feeds all of them at the same time. $BLOB launches on Pons, on Robinhood Chain.

The console only changes your own dish. The market changes everyone's.

Tip: click anywhere on the agar while holding Shift to drop food right there.

• One cell. The whole yellow network is a single cell. Its nuclei divide in sync and share one cytoplasm.
• Shuttle streaming. The cytoplasm flows back and forth through the veins, reversing about every one to two minutes.
• Mazes. In 2000 Toshiyuki Nakagaki's team showed that it connects two food sources in a maze by the shortest route.
• Tokyo. In 2010 Atsushi Tero and colleagues placed oat flakes at the positions of cities around Tokyo. The network it built was comparable to the real railway in cost, efficiency and fault tolerance.
• Memory without a brain. It leaves a slime trail and avoids places it has already searched.
• Sleep. When it dries out it hardens into a sclerotium and can wake up years later when wetted.
• Space. In 2021 pieces of it flew to the International Space Station for a school experiment.
• Salt and light. It avoids both. That is why salt is the burn here.