Polish scientists at the Institute of Organic Chemistry have teamed up with blockchain technology to learn how life began on Earth. They have made a vast network and used stuff like water and nitrogen to look at the first things that led to humans.
Before this, in 2020, they wrote about their ideas in a Science article, but there were some limits. Now, using the Golem network, which is like a big computer-sharing club, they made a network that’s 100,000 times bigger than before. This cool mix of crypto and studying life’s beginnings helped them do much more without needing supercomputers.
The Golem network works like a team, where people share their extra computer power and get paid with GLM tokens, a special kind of digital money just for the Golem network. To learn more, the scientists used 20,000 computer cores on Golem to pretend or simulate 11 billion reactions. They paid out 82,000 GLM tokens (worth around $38,000 at that time) to the people who shared their computer power.
Now, those GLM tokens are worth about $17,000. The scientists believe that if they used normal computer services, it might have cost them $80,000. So, by using this special computer-sharing system, they are saving money.
This way of doing research with crypto is becoming more popular. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong is selling some of his COIN shares to support ResearchHub, which is like a special website for scientists. It helps give money to research projects, like paying for reviews from other scientists. ResearchCoin, its own kind of digital money, even went up by 1000% in value in late 2023.
This mix of blockchain and science is helping in the learning of how life began on our planet further.
