Gridcoin is a cryptocurrency that rewards scientific work done through your computer or phone on the BOINC platform. It aims to reduce wasted computation and instead reward useful ones. It is a PoS cryptocurrency to reduce the energy used for the network, but with the addition of rewards on top of your stake for the research your computer did.
Unlike like other cryptocurrencies that try to reward various BOINC projects, it reward far more projects and is way more decentralized. Gridcoin currently rewards 18 different projects that range from researching COVID-19, cancer, asteroids, and gravitational waves, to an 87 year old unsolved problem in mathematics and many more. In rewarding these projects, Gridcoin makes use of a system it calls the scrapers which helps keep this system scalable but doesn’t revolve around one single person or group pulling the stats about how much work you have done on a project. Instead, each scraper pulls the data individually and shares it individually. The nodes on the networks compare the data each one sends and validates for itself that they all match. By comparison, most of the other related cryptocurrencies have a single person or bot that takes these stats and decide how much to give out.
Gridcoin has been around since 2013 and has seen many changes in how it operates. It has a voting system that allows and has allowed the community to decide the direction of the coin. It has changed from PoW to PoS, exponential inflation to linear, built up the system of scrapers, and much more. Gridcoin has active development with many new features on the horizon such as rewarding folding@home (which is separate from BOINC), an overall of the GUI, and more.
For more details about the coin see the site homepage and its wiki and the advantages and features wiki page in particular
Note: I’m not sure if this is the correct place to put this since Gridcoin is already on coinrankings, so feel free to delete this post if that is the case. I just filled out the forum to update its description and the fourm mentioned this section, so I’d thought I’d also mention Gridcoin here too. Anyway I just think Gridcoin is a really cool cryptocurrency
