Major US ETH miner helps fight COVID-19 by redirecting GPUs

With COVID-19 infection continues to spread throughout the world, many of the companies that could afford to stay in business are doing what they can to contribute to the fight against the virus. One of the most recent examples is CoreWeave, the largest US Ethereum miner, which recently revealed that it had redirected up to 6,000 GPUs from mining towards researching coronavirus.

Reports say that the GPUs are now being used by Stanford University’s project called Folding@home, which has allowed other users to contribute their computing power and help fight the current pandemic.

How can CoreWeave help Folding@home?

CoreWeave joined in as soon as doing so was possible, as revealed by Brian Venturo, the company’s CTO and co-founder. Venturo also said that CoreWeave doubled the total power of the network with its GPUs. The company’s processing power is also said to make up around 0.2% of the Ethereum network’s entire hashrate.

With so many powerful GPUs, the firm was able to earn approximately 28 ETH each day, which is currently worth around $3,900, according to current prices. However, it had decided that battling coronavirus and developing a cure is a more important goal at this time. Meanwhile, the Folding@home project is currently one of the projects that are investing a lot of effort towards that very goal.

The project has helped with the creation of many other important and highly necessary drugs in the past, and Venturo himself said that the project’s research had ‘profound impacts on the development of front-line HIV defense drugs.’

With the help of the United States’ largest Ethereum miner, perhaps the project will have enough resources to help create a cure for coronavirus, as well. The project itself revealed how it uses computer simulations to understand the moving parts of proteins, which is what it needs computing power for. Everyone with a desktop or a laptop can contribute, and their contribution will be highly appreciated, however small it may be.

Unfortunately, ASICs (Application-Specific Integrated Circuits), which are created for mining BTC and some other top cryptos, are not of much help here as they are designed specifically for crypto mining. Another thing that Venturo had noted is that, despite all of these efforts, there is still a very low chance that the project will manage to create a drug and deliver it to the market. After discussing it with experts, Venturo was able to estimate that the chance sits in between 2% and 5%.