This is a big milestone for one of most exciting and hopeful international scientific collaborations humanity has ever seen. All the data gathered by this project is open and patent-free, and they plan to begin clinical trials in 2023. Their goal is to produce an affordable, shelf-stable, patent-free, oral COVID-19 cure.

Folding@home volunteers (and by extension, the crypto projects incentivizing folding) are credited in the paper’s acknowledgement section:

*“We employed Folding@Home a worldwide distributed computing network where hundreds of thousands of volunteers around the world contributed computing power to create the world’s first exascale computing resource to compute the free energy of binding of all 20,000+ crowdsourced submissions”

“We also thank the numerous volunteers that contributed compound designs to the COVID moonshot and to the citizen scientist volunteers of Folding@home for donating their computing resources, and Amazon Web Services for key support of Folding@home infrastructure”*

To learn more about COVID moonshot, check out their website. Folding@Home is a free program you can download to contribute your computer’s un-used processing power to disease research.