Healthy lifestyles and proper medical care are both important to many people, and a couple projects in the crypto world aim to bolster the existing networks by providing incentives for participating in both. Below I take a look at two projects aimed to improve medical research while earning some coins, and another aimed at incentivizing leading a healthy lifestyle.
Research
Curecoin
Curecoin is a longstanding project looking to combine medical research with incentivized participation. Users can use the Folding@Home platform to contribute their computer’s processing power to a variety of medical research projects and earn some Curecoin in the process.
When a user sets up their F@H client properly, they will begin to accept work units as part of the research project of their choice. Once these units are completed by either their CPU or GPU, it will undergo a verification process and once it passes reward the user with Curecoins.
The Curecoin 2.0 hardfork enabled full proof-of-stake minting which reduced the usefulness of ASIC machines on the network and pushed 99.99% of the network’s computing power to go into research. To add to this, the project is looking to include more research options than just F@H which would give users more projects to choose from.
BANANO
Although not specifically a medical research platform, the lighthearted BANANO team has found a way to offer their BANANO coin as incentive for using the F@H platform as well. Much like Curecoin, this gives users a chance to donate processing power to medical research and be rewarded for each work unit completed for a research project of their choice.
BANANO is a fork of the NANO network and boasts an extremely meme-rich and dedicated community. Their Yellowpaper provides more insight into the project and how it improves on the NANO platform. I will admit, BANANO is currently one of my favorite projects and in my eyes there is almost no downside to earning some extra BANANO alongside contributions to research.
Wellbeing
Clinicoin
Although there isn't much for wellbeing focused platforms, I did find one that shows some progress and still has signs of life. Clinicoin is an Ethereum built blockchain focused on creating a health and wellness platform pushed to the next level through token incentives. Rewards are earned through health, wellness, and research activities. It offers a much more private platform to track your wellness and exercises without selling any of your data to advertisers.
Clinicoin’s Proof of Engagement is the protocol through which rewards are earned by either entering activities manually, or connecting to any mHealth mobile apps they use to track automatically. The activities are validated by two types of Proof of Engagement Validators; Developers of apps can integrate with the platform to confirm the user’s activities, or IRL Validators (such as personal trainers, class instructors, etc.) can verify activities done in group or real life settings. Both validators, in turn, earn tokens for their roles in the network.
I think the crypto world still has a lot to offer the medical field and I hope to see some other projects pop up over time to help improve medical care and research. I would love to see something that opens up medical care to more people in an effective and more affordable manner eventually. But right now we have a handful of projects doing their part to change the medical field.
Resources
https://curecoin.net/
https://banano.cc/
https://banano.cc/yellowpaper/
https://clinicoin.io/en