In 2018, Obyte joined the World Community Grid (WCG) to help good causes —and distribute rewards to our users. The WCG is a charitable digital project started back in 2004 by the tech giant IBM. In 2021, its assets were transferred to Krembil Research Institute, part of the University Health Network (UHN). In a few words, it lets anyone, everywhere, donate their spare computing power for scientific research purposes.
By using all the energy that WCG provides, numerous scientists can quickly analyze large packs of data and make simulations of events and treatments. For example, evaluating a candidate protein that could be an effective treatment for COVID-19. This kind of research includes so many variants and data that it would take decades with only the computing power that could be provided by researchers.
Volunteers from all over the world are reducing this humanitarian research to only months by donating their idle power. So far, the WCG has helped to find effective treatments for Zika, dengue, malaria, neuroblastoma cancer cells, HIV/AIDS, and other illnesses. Likewise, they’ve found new materials and methods to provide clean energy and water.
They have “published over 35 peer-reviewed papers in scientific journals and have completed millions of CPU-years of computation in less than a decade”. All of this was possible thanks to over 808,000 users with 7.6 million devices, organized in 5,000 teams. Those teams are usually organizations or companies (and their users) providing their computing resources.
WCG and Obyte
Obyte has been a WCG team since 2018. Initially, it was a distribution method for GBYTEs, with the help of a wallet chatbot still in use. Any Obyte user can join WCG, optionally join our team, and get some rewards for their contribution. The WCG platform reflects all contributions through symbolic points, easily observable on the personal dashboard.
To participate, it’s necessary to register on the WCG with the specific user provided by our chatbot (or change it in an existing account).
The GBYTEs distribution with this method ended in October 2022, but it’s still possible to get some bytes if your WCG account already has some points. This is a one-time reward that depends on the amount of WCG points you generated, and it could go like this:
- 100,000 to 1,000,000 points: $0.02;
- 1,000,000 to 10,000,000 points: $0.30;
- 10,000,000 to 100,000,000 points: $4.00;
- Over 100,000,000 points: $15.00.
In addition, all users will receive non-transferable WCG tokens from Obyte at a rate of 1 point = 1 WCG. Of course, this is mostly a symbolic reward, but some services might choose to offer benefits to users with a large balance of this asset. After all, they’re contributing to a great cause.
Our team has accumulated over 59.1 billion points with 804 permanent users so far. We’re in the Top-10 Teams on WCG, as #9. All this computing power has helped in projects like Mapping Cancer Markers, Africa Rainfall Project, Fight AIDS, OpenZika, Outsmart Ebola, and COVID-19.
We’re improving the world! Will you join us?