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Gridcoin (GRC) has long been one of the veterans, so to say of the cryptocurrency space.

Initially established in 2013, Gridcoin implements a “Proof-of-Research” scheme, which rewards users with Gridcoin for performing useful scientific computations on the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC), a distributed volunteer computing platform.

Gridcoin was inspired by the desire to create a useful alternative to Bitcoin’s proof-of-work scheme. The proof-of-research mechanism works in conjunction with BOINC and is primarily used by universities, scientists and companies for individual projects that require memory hard and number crunching.

Gridcoin’s whitepaper stated that 20% of BOINC’s processing power is due to Gridcoin- exemplifying just how important Gridcoin’s incentive mechanism has become.

There are two ways to contribute to the network and earn Gridcoin- solo crunching and pool crunching. They both contribute to the network but do have their drawbacks.

Pool crunching charges fees on your earnings and solo crunching require an initial investment. A common strategy used by investors is to earn with pool crunching until you have enough to put it back into solo crunching, so there’s no need for an initial investment.

If users can go through this process, they could be using the hardware in their devices such as smartphones, laptops, and computers, that otherwise would be useless when it’s on standby mode, but in conjunction with BOINC, it could be useful, and users can earn from their use.

The reasons why Gridcoin would be appealing as an investment would be for two reasons:

Firstly, the project has currently a very low valuation. The coin is sat on a one-year support line the technical analysis of the coin shows a graph strongly resembling a downward wedge, which would indicate that a bullish breakout could be imminent very soon- given the current state of the market Gridcoin should be considered a very safe investment.

Another reason for a favorable view of Gridcoin is useful and will continue to be useful and won’t disappear like other cryptocurrencies. The number of BOINC computations done via Gridcoin continues to grow and will only increase the recognition of the project, and investments which increase Grodcoin’s value will improve the capabilities of BOINC’s software and ultimately increases the number of resources available for scientific research.

Potential concerns do remain for investing in Gridcoin, such as at the moment; there is no real demand for Gridoin, as running projects on BOINC are free due to it being a volunteer-based computing software.

Despite this concern, Gridcoin has a passionate and robust community which has shown great loyalty towards the project and is always aiming for improvements for the project; this along with the advantages of Gridcoin, which seeks to solve real-world problems with their proof of research consensus, make the project very appealing investment for the wider cryptocurrency community.

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