Bitfury Becomes Latest Crypto Industry Player to Join COVID-19 Research Project

Blockchain improvement agency Bitfury is re-assigning the computing energy it makes use of for digital forex transaction processing to COVID-19 analysis.

In an announcement on March 31, the corporate revealed that it had been allocating its high-powered GPU-enabled computing nodes to run COVID-19 calculations as of March 20.

The redirection of Bitfury’s sources is contributing to a distributed computing endeavor, Folding@House (F@H), created by a consortium of scientific analysis labs throughout North America, Europe and Asia.

Within the wake of the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, F@H has launched a challenge to run simulations of the virus’ molecular construction in an effort to contribute to the event of efficient therapeutics.

The challenge, which calls for monumental computational energy, has been looking for donations of computational sources from enterprises, organizations and people.

Bitfury, for its half, has reportedly thus far used its nodes to finish over 1,300 calculations for the F@H initiative.

In an announcement, Bitfury CEO Valery Vavilov stated he was “assured that this challenge from Folding at House, alongside the work of many researchers and medical doctors, will considerably advance our understanding and remedy of this illness.”

Robust backing from the crypto trade

As Cointelegraph has beforehand reported, Bitfury is simply the most recent of a sequence of crypto trade gamers to affix the F@H challenge.

The challenge has received help from decentralized computing community Golem, and blockchain platform Tezos (XTZ), who earmarked a donation pool of a number of hundred XTZ to be awarded to the biggest F@H donor on the finish of this month.

As of March 12, Tezos has had 20 groups contributing sources to the challenge. U.S.-based Ether (ETH) miner Coreweave has diverted the computational energy of roughly 6,000 GPUs, in addition to main chip producer Nvidia. In mid-March, Nvidia additionally appealed to particular person players to contribute their very own unused GPU computing sources to the analysis effort.