The largest Ethereum miner in the United States "donates" computing power to support new coronavirus drug research

CoreWeave, the largest U.S. miner on the Ethereum blockchain, is putting 6,000 of its specialized computer chips to work in a search to find a cure for the coronavirus.

That GPU power will go to Stanford University’s Folding@home, a research effort launched on February 27 that is studying the coronavirus through a unique approach to drug development: it connects thousands of computers around the world to form a distributed supercomputer for disease research.

Brian Venturo, co-founder and CTO of CoreWeave, said the project had at least a chance of finding a drug to treat the virus, so CoreWeave doubled the processing power of the entire network using its GPUs, which handle repetitive calculations.

According to Venturo, these 6,000 GPUs account for about 0.2% of Ethereum’s total hashrate and can mine approximately 28 ether per day, worth $3,864 at press time.

There’s no cure for COVID-19 yet (although many organizations, including IBM’s supercomputers, are working on vaccines and research to combat the disease), but Venturo noted that Folding@home has already helped lead to breakthroughs in the development of other important medicines.

"Their research has had a profound impact on the development of first-line anti-HIV drugs, and we hope our computing power can help fight the new coronavirus."

The coronavirus has caused heavy losses around the world. Italy and Spain are on lockdown. Meetings, shops and restaurants have been shut down to stop the spread of the disease, and the resulting panic has spread to financial markets.

When the idea of ​​using GPU computing power for COVID-19 research was proposed, the CoreWeave team did not hesitate.

Venturo said they had the test system up and running "in minutes." From there, the project snowballed. CoreWeave contributes more than half of Folding@home's coronavirus research.

“We never thought, ‘Should we do this?’ It just happened organically. We’re excited about the help we can give.”

Folding@home is a decentralized project similar to Bitcoin. Rather than a single research company using a large computer to conduct research, Folding@home collects the computing power of anyone around the world who wants to participate in the research - even if it's just a laptop with a tiny amount of computing power.

In this project, computing power is used to find useful information related to the new coronavirus. Just like in Bitcoin mining, one user may find a "solution" and distribute this information to others.

Venturo said:

"Their protein simulators try to find potential solutions, whether existing (U.S. Food and Drug Administration)-approved drugs or other known formulations can help inhibit or treat the virus."

Folding@home explains in the article that viruses contain proteins "that they use to suppress our immune systems and reproduce themselves. To combat COVID-19, we want to understand how these viral proteins work and how we can design treatments to block them."

Simulating these proteins and then looking at them from different angles helps scientists better understand them and potentially find antidote. Computers can quickly change these variables to speed up the process.

Folding@home can use more hashrate. Venturo is calling on other GPU miners to join.

Even without a call, other cryptocurrency miners are already taking action on their own. Last week, Tulip.tools founder Johann Tanzer called on Tezos bakers (equivalent to miners) to send 15 XTZ, worth about $25 at press time, to the top contributors to Folding@home.

To Tanzer’s surprise, the initiative has been very popular. Although their contribution may not be as large as CoreWeave’s, 20 Tezos miners are now contributing. Tezos users have also started donating, and donations have increased to about $600.

But that's not all miners can participate. Venturo said that while GPUs are flexible, ASICs are more limited. Although ASICs are more powerful than GPUs, they really only have one use: mining cryptocurrency. This is one advantage Venturo believes Ethereum has over Bitcoin, as GPU mining is still viable, while the latter is now dominated by ASICs.

“This is one of the great things about the Ethereum mining ecosystem, which is the largest GPU computing resource on the planet. We were able to redeploy our hardware in a matter of minutes to help fight the global pandemic.”

However, it is worth noting that Ethereum has already witnessed an “invasion” of ASICs. In addition, due to the upcoming key upgrade of Ethereum, traditional miners may become “extinct”.