Fold for RaiblocksOne
Donate the spare capacity of a computer you already own to disease research, and have the work counted for the RaiblocksOne team. It runs in the background, you can stop it at any time, and it costs nothing but electricity. XRO rewards for folders are committed but not live yet.
Enter this as your Team in Folding@home Web Control. Full steps below.
What Folding@home is
Folding@home is a distributed computing project run by researchers studying how proteins fold and misfold, which underlies diseases including Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, Huntington's and several cancers. Simulating that is enormously expensive, so instead of one supercomputer the work is split into small pieces and handed out to volunteers' machines. Your computer does a piece, sends the result back, and gets another.
Teams exist so groups can pool their contribution and see it counted together. Joining the RaiblocksOne team costs you nothing and takes about five minutes.
You do not need to own any XRO
Folding is open to anyone with a computer. You do not need a wallet, an account with us, or any cryptocurrency to take part or to be counted toward the team.
XRO rewards for folders are committed, but not live yet
The project has committed to rewarding people who fold for this team in XRO. Nothing is being paid out today. No rate has been set, no start date has been fixed, and the system that would connect a Folding@home contribution to an XRO payout has not been built. This page will change when that changes, and will say plainly what is actually paying.
One thing worth doing now: set your Folding@home username to an XRO address you control. Contributions are recorded against your username in the public team statistics, so the address itself becomes the record of who did the work. That is what makes it possible to credit folding you did before rewards started, with nothing to register and nothing to claim later.
Use a dedicated address, not your main wallet. See below for why that matters.
How to join
These steps are for the current version 8 client. Older guides describing config files or a separate control application are out of date.
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Install the client
Download it from the official site and install it like any other application. Windows, macOS and Linux are all supported.
Only ever download it from
foldingathome.org. We do not host or mirror the client. -
Open Web Control
The client is configured through a web page rather than a desktop window. After installing, open app.foldingathome.org, which talks to the client running on your own machine.
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Set your username and the team number
Where you enter it depends on whether you use a Folding@home Account:
- With an account: set Team in Account Settings. It then applies to every machine you sign in on.
- Without an account: set Team in each machine's Machine Settings, on every machine you want to count.
The team number is 1068422.
In the same place, set your Name (username) to an XRO address you control. It looks like
xro_1abc...and is 64 characters long. Folding@home allows letters, numbers and underscores with no length limit, so an XRO address is a valid username exactly as it is.Use a dedicated address, not your main wallet
Folding@home statistics are public and permanent. Putting an address in your username creates a lasting, searchable link between your folding activity and that address's balance and entire transaction history, which anyone can look up on the explorer.
Make a fresh account in the wallet purely for folding. It costs nothing, and it keeps your main balance out of a public leaderboard.
Paste it, do not type it
Folding@home usernames are case-sensitive, so
xro_1abcandXRO_1ABCcount as two different people. An address typed by hand, or with the case altered, silently becomes a separate account whose work cannot be credited to you. Copy and paste from your wallet every time.Check the number before you save
Team numbers are just integers, and a typo silently credits a different team. Nothing will warn you.
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Set a passkey, optional but worth it
A passkey is a token that ties completed work to you rather than to anyone using the same username. Folding@home only awards the Quick Return Bonus to donors who have one, and that bonus is a large part of the points a fast machine earns. You request one from Folding@home and paste it into the same settings page.
It is not a password and not a wallet key
A Folding@home passkey has nothing to do with your XRO wallet and gives no access to any funds. Keep it private anyway, since it identifies your work.
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Let it run
That is the whole setup. The client picks up work automatically and pauses when you need the machine. Your contribution shows up against the team on the official statistics site within a few hours of finishing your first work unit.
A note on what this costs
Folding uses spare CPU and GPU capacity, which means real electricity and real heat. On a desktop that is usually unremarkable. On a laptop running on battery, or hardware you would rather not run hot, it is worth thinking about first. You can cap how much it uses, or pause it, from the same Web Control page.
What is RaiblocksOne?
If you arrived from the Folding@home team page, here is the short version.
RaiblocksOne (ticker XRO) is a cryptocurrency, a fork of Nano. Sending it is free and settles in seconds. There is no mining, so contributing to the network does not mean burning electricity on proof-of-work: the network is secured by representatives that anyone can run and that anyone can freely choose between.
It was distributed in 2023 by taking a snapshot of the Nano ledger and giving holders the same balance in XRO, rather than through a sale. The remainder is paid out over 30 years to representatives who keep the network running.
The projectWhat XRO is, how it works, and where it came from. WalletOpen-source and browser based. Your keys stay on your device. Run a nodeOne command, about 45 minutes, on x86 or ARM. This is the most useful thing you can do for the network. WhitepaperWhy the project exists and how the economics work.