At CES this past January, IBM researcher Veena Pureswaran described the company’s joint plan with Samsung to get home appliances to exchange cryptocurrency with one another. The currency, called Ether, is similar to bitcoin, except that the traded commodity isn’t directly related to a financial value. Instead, Ether’s value is computing power.

What distinguishes the Ether and bitcoin cryptocurrencies from traditional money is the online system that records their every trade. Networks of people called miners use the software to collectively verify and record these cryptocurrencies’ every trade. Like ever-growing strands of DNA, the currencies’ digital addresses, called blockchains, store the details of each trade. Bitcoin and Ether run on their own software platforms, but in both cases, a blockchain makes the whole idea possible.

Letting connected devices barter computing power in the Ether cryptocurrency would address a basic issue of the coming Internet of Things era: paying for the cloud services that will allow devices to do useful things and talk to each other. Instead of relying on ads, fees from paying users, or selling data to third parties, hardware makers could use Ether as the basis for device-to-device communications and transactions.

Ether would blanket all of a connected home’s devices in a network of code to minimize computing costs, reduce the scale of operation, maximize device longevity, and guarantee consumer privacy for all stakeholders in a connected future. In short, Ether could be the Internet of Things’s wonder drug.

The company that is helping IBM and Samsung bring connected objects into Ether is Ethereum. Founded in 2014 by a group of bitcoin enthusiasts–including a 2014 Thiel Fellow named Vitalik Buterin–Ethereum is promoting a more widespread use of blockchain technology: blockchain applications for everything. Using Ethereum’s platform, coding a blockchain application should be as easy as creating a webpage in HTML.

Ethereum has built an open-source software platform that any coder can use to write blockchain-based applications. Additionally, anyone can join Ethereum’s network and offer up a computer’s computing power to the network. Then, the applications that are built on Ethereum’s software platform run on the collective power of all the computers that have joined Ethereum’s network, rather than in one centralized datacenter.

Ethereum’s chief communications officer, Stephan Tual

“Basically, what we’re doing is building the world’s biggest computer,” says Stephan Tual, Ethereum’s chief communications officer. He imagines a scenario where more and more people will volunteer their desktops’ computing power to run programs that were built on Ethereum’s software platform.