By Jason Patterson | NETHERLANDS

A relatively new German startup has been using the body heat of volunteers to mine cryptocurrencies in a project reminiscent of “The Matrix.”

A business venture based in The Hague, Netherlands, called Ioho has utilized specially-designed bodysuits to turn excess body heat into digital currency since the beginning of 2015.

On their website, they claim that. “A single human body at rest radiates 100 watts of excess heat…We created a body-suit that uses thermoelectric generators to harvest the temperature differential between the human body and ambient and converts it into usable electricity. The electricity generated is then fed to a computer that produces cryptocurrency. ”

The company claims that it has chosen its pursuits solely on alternative coins such as Dash and Lisk, and not coins like Bitcoin, given the relatively low energy requirements needed for mining.

They have gotten more than 37 volunteers that have apparently produced $127,210 over the course of 212 hours since the project’s inception.

During one interview, with Motherboard’s Daniel Oberhaus, IoHO founder Manuel Beltrán explained the idea of the company, how it works and how it has grown.

“We never mined bitcoins because it would be useless to produce them with human heat,” Beltrán said. “We exclusively mined altcoins and some of them have risen over 46,000% in value. What in the beginning were just small cents now became substantial amounts of money.”

Volunteers were permitted to keep 80 percent while the remaining 20 were kept by the IoHO.

Oberhaus claims that if they decided to use and go in the direction of Bitcoin, it would have taken more than 44,000 volunteers spending 24 hours per day in the bodysuit for one month to achieve the number of funds they have presently met.

“To do 1 bitcoin per month with IoHO’s tech—which in terms of efficiency is on par with most affordable wearable thermoelectric generators available today—you’d need around 44,000 people providing their body energy 24/7,” Oberhaus writes.

The bodysuits from IoHo are claimed to only be capable of harvesting less than 1 percent of the body heat made by the volunteers.

The website also reads “Machines are outing us…As some time ago happened to horses after the invention of the steam engine, humans are becoming obsolete to perform mechanical labor, soon, with the advance of artificial intelligence, it will also affect our possibilities to be useful workers performing intellectual labor.”