Crypto can do lots of things. It can bull and bear, moon and dip, and even obtain food to dip in sauce. But did you know it can also help us cure cancer?

Some exciting news came out of the World Community Grid recently, which is a volunteer research project working on mapping the relationship between genes and health outcomes: they’ve identified 26 new genes associated with lung cancer. To do this, they use the computers of volunteers to crunch billions of data points over many years. Each day this project burns through about 240 years of computation (of one computer). The amount of computing power required is massive.

The cool thing about this? World Community Grid is one of about a dozen projects which is incentivized by Gridcoin (lemmy community). Instead of paying miners to just calculate hashes, Gridcoin pays miners to contribute their processing power to science projects, including to World Community Grid, Folding @ home, Alzheimer’s research, mapping pulsars, and more all in a decentralized, automated manner. And it’s been doing this since 2013 when they asked “What if all that hashpower going towards Bitcoin instead went to science?”, making it one of the longer-lived cryptos out there that still has an active development team and user base.

I love all the cool things crypto can do. Cool to be here with y’all. Excited to see what it does next, after it’s done curing cancer and exploring the universe, of course.