One cell. One network.
Every buy feeds it.

The Blobarium is a live slime mould in a petri dish. Every buy of $BLOB is food dropped on the agar. The blob smells it, reaches it, wires it into its network of veins and grows.

Physarum polycephalum is a single yellow cell with millions of nuclei and no brain. It still finds the shortest path through a maze and has rebuilt a railway network from oat flakes. That is the idea of the coin: one organism shared by everyone, and every buy feeds it.

Quick start

1. Open the dish. The plasmodium is already growing when the loading screen fades.
2. Wait for a buy. A ring marks where the food lands. Watch the front of the blob turn towards it.
3. Click a piece of food. The specimen card opens on the right and the camera follows it: who bought it, when it was found, when it was wired in.
4. Press V. Veins mode hides the colour and shows only the network.
5. Press D. The dossier has a console that drops food, rain and salt into your own dish.

Keys

What you are looking at

CAM 01 films a 90 mm petri dish of plain 1.5% agar under a stereo microscope, in the dark, as a time-lapse. The yellow network is the plasmodium. Pale shapes are food. White cubes are salt. Small dark heads on stalks are sporangia.

The dish is a grid of 400 × 400 cells; one cell is about 0.24 mm. The plasmodium is made of 4,000 to 30,000 particles, depending on how well fed it is and how fast your device is.

How it works

1. A buy lands. Its size in ETH picks the food. It lands on bare agar, away from the veins, so the blob has to go and find it.
2. The scent spreads. Food leaks a gradient into the agar: a strong one close by and a faint one across the dish.
3. The front turns. Particles at the edge of the blob follow the gradient and lay trail as they go. Others follow the trail. A pseudopod forms.
4. Found. When particles reach the food, its time-to-find is logged and it starts being eaten.
5. Wired in. When an unbroken vein joins the food to the main body, it counts as part of the network.
6. Eaten. Every unit eaten becomes biomass. More biomass means more particles. Veins to empty spots fade.
7. Fruiting. At 760 units of biomass the blob fruits: sporangia rise from the thickest veins and release spores a minute later.

buy (ETH) ─▶ food on agar ─▶ scent ─▶ pseudopod ─▶ found ─▶ wired in
                                                         │
spores ◀─ sporangia ◀─ fruiting ◀─ biomass ◀─ eaten ◀────┘

Food

The size of the buy picks the food and its weight.

units = round(base + ETH × 300)

Bigger food smells stronger and further, so a golden truffle can pull the whole front of the blob across the dish. Food nobody reaches within four minutes dries out and is taken away.

The rule is also on the page as BLOB.foodFor(eth) in the browser console.

The model

The blob is the agent model of Physarum by Jeff Jones (2010). Each particle is a tiny piece of plasmodium. It has three sensors in front of it and does the same four things every step, 30 times a second:

1. Sense the trail plus food scent at three points ahead: left, front, right.
2. Turn towards the strongest one. If the front is weakest, turn left or right at random.
3. Move one cell forward, if that cell is free. One particle per cell; a blocked particle picks a new random heading.
4. Deposit trail where it lands.

Then the whole trail map is blurred (3 × 3 mean) and multiplied by 0.9. Nothing in the network is drawn by hand: veins, loops and pseudopods come out of these rules.

The network

Every two seconds the dish is measured. Cells with enough trail count as plasmodium; connected cells form bodies; the largest body is the main body.

The maze

Press M for Nakagaki's maze: plastic walls, plasmodium in every corridor and an oat cluster at the entrance and the exit. In the real experiment the veins that survived ran along the shortest route. Here, watch which corridors stay thick.

Growth and fruiting

Market events

Before launch

Until the token address is set, the market is simulated: a buy every 3–12 s with sizes drawn from a log-normal curve (median about 0.02 ETH), rain every 150–270 s, salt every 220–360 s. The market panel says SIMULATED.

The log

Live link

$BLOB launches on Pons, on Robinhood Chain (chain ID 4663, gas in ETH). Once CONTRACT is set in config.js, the page reads trades straight from the chain with eth_getLogs every 3 seconds. No server of ours is involved.

Where it looks

A busy block can hold dozens of buys. All of them count in the market panel; the twelve biggest of each poll become food. On a pool trade the buyer is looked up only when you tag the food. The market cap is the last trade price × 1,000,000,000 tokens × the ETH price from DeFiLlama. Tokens the page cannot read on-chain, or tokens paired with something other than ETH, fall back to DexScreener's counters.

Real or not

Settings

Everything lives in config.js next to index.html.

window.BLOB_CONFIG = {
  CONTRACT: "",        // token address (0x…); empty = simulated market
  TICKER: "$BLOB",
  TWITTER: "",         // https://x.com/...
  TELEGRAM: "",        // https://t.me/...
  BUY_URL: "",         // empty = the token's page on Pons
  CHART_URL: "",       // empty = DexScreener (robinhood)
  BUYBACK_WALLET: "",  // its buys fall as rain
  SITE_URL: "",        // for share cards
  RPC_HTTP: ""         // empty = Robinhood Chain public RPC
};

Science

• Nakagaki, T., Yamada, H. & Tóth, Á. (2000). Maze-solving by an amoeboid organism. Nature 407, 470.
• Tero, A. et al. (2010). Rules for biologically inspired adaptive network design. Science 327, 439–442. The Tokyo railway experiment.
• Jones, J. (2010). Characteristics of pattern formation and evolution in approximations of Physarum transport networks. Artificial Life 16(2), 127–153. The model used here.

Other facts in the dossier: the cytoplasm shuttles back and forth through the veins every minute or two; a dried plasmodium becomes a sclerotium that can wake up years later; samples flew to the International Space Station in 2021 for a school experiment.

Glossary