Join the Cardano Foundation’s Community Management Team on Folding@Home

Further to Nathan Kaiser’s recent post about Covid-19, the time to come together as a Cardano community and as the human race to flatten the curve is now. How can we make it tangible and material? What kind of action could we take?

On Thursday 19 March 2020 during an all-hands internal community team call, Andy Hendrikx (@Andy_Hendrikx), Community Manager at the Cardano Foundation, suggested our community support the Folding@Home project. A large number of the Foundation staff decided to take part in this project even though this is not an organizational CSR initiative.

The Folding@Home is a project focused on disease research. The problems researchers are solving, such as understanding the virus, require so many computer calculations and they need to borrow computational power to help find the cure.

How does it work?

Folding@Home offers a software program that can be installed onto your personal computer. As soon as it is running and connected to external systems, it will start using part of your machine’s computational resources. Your computational resources will power efforts to discover the proteins that Covid-19 virus uses to protect its cells. The aim of this effort is to create medicines and vaccines to cure and protect from Covid-19 by combining the resources to study this virus’s proteins. Participation is free, apart from minor electricity usage.

Interested in helping out? Here are a few simple steps on how to participate.

Web Client:

Go to https://client.foldingathome.org/ and install the client for your OS. (The pictures shown are for iOS)

Use the folding “Power” slider to adjust the amount of CPU (or for some GPU) power you wish to allocate.

to adjust the amount of CPU (or for some GPU) power you wish to allocate. Adjust the “When” options, to decide when you would like to contribute.

options, to decide when you would like to contribute. Optional: If you want your contributions to be associated with the Cardano community team , change the team number from “0” to “ 244483 ” via the “ Change Identity ” button in the top left.

If you want your contributions to be associated with the , change the team number from to “ ” via the “ ” button in the top left. Please leave the "I support research fighting" set to * “Any disease”, as this setting is currently focusing on Covid19 research.

set to * “Any disease”, as this setting is currently focusing on Covid19 research. Click “Start Folding” and off you go!

(Pic above: you can also get a Passkey for extra identity security and to claim any bonus points.)

(Screenshot above: web client interface)

There are also a plethora of instructional Youtube videos available, in case you need more information on the Folding@Home project.

You can view the “Cardano” team statistics via this webpage.

(Please note: The Folding@Home infrastructure is currently receiving major attention and network load worldwide from (new) participants. As a result, you may not be able to get the full Cardano team stats, your own stats, or get “Work Units” assigned every now and then.

We suggest to leave things running for a while anyway and checking back from time to time. You can read the Twitter thread from the Folding@Home team here. Following them will also help you keep up to date for any updates.)

DISCLAIMER: Please remember that this is not our (CF/EMURGO/IOHK) software and we are only its fellow users. If you have any trouble – or if your computer overheats – please contact the Folding@Home team for support on their forum.

Please hit that LIKE button and let us know here in the thread if you are taking part.

Good luck Folding@Home!