I am going to start with what Folding@Home is first and then get into what this $1,000 pool is about.

So Folding@Home was the original miner. It is a piece of software that runs on your computer that uses your extra resources to basically help find cures to common diseases like ALS, Parkinson's, Cancer, Influenza and now specifically the CoronaVirus (COVID-19). It gets really scientific but I will try to explain what it does. The software tries to simulate protein folding, which means that it finds the process by which a protein reaches its final three-dimensional structure. If they are able to do that they are able to find causes of how that protein mis-folded. Proteins are what make up things and if researches can find how the COVID-19 proteins are folded and created then they can create treatments and hopefully vaccines.

Researches need an insane amount of computing power to simulate protein folding. So they crowd-sourced the shit out of it. Back in June of 2019 the total speed Folding@Home had was 98.7 petaFLOPS. Now what is a petaFLOP you may ask yourself. Well a single FLOP is a measure of a computers performance. FLOP = Floating Point Operations per Second. 

So 1 petaFLOP is 1,000,000,000,000,000 Floating Operations per second.

With that said Folding@Home is a piece of software you install on your device and let run in the background and it helps create those protein foldings and there by help researches find the cause and cures for different diseases.

Let's now get into the $1,000 prize pool of Tezos for running this software. Johann Tanzer is a developer for Tezos. He wanted to do something to help the COVID-19 research so he created a prize pool to encourage people to run the Folding@Home software. Also just to give it exposure to those of us who have extra computer resources for mining but might want to take a break to help fight COVID-19. Johann Tanzer did not put up all $1,000 into the pool as people are continuing to donate Tezos into the pool. It started at 15 XTZ and has grown to over 340 XTZ prize pool.

How it works is at the end of the month (March 30th) a winner or winners will be picked who helped the most (lent the most computing power). You will need to setup the Folding@Home software and then on their website setup a Team. Your team name needs to be your tz1 address so that if/when you win they can send you the Tezos. Johann Tanzer suggested using ASIC based mining rig but anything you have will help the cause.

If you do have a mining rig please consider joining this project if for nothing else then to help all those effected by COVID-19. Even if you do it for a day or a week it will help. I know we all mine and stake our tokens to earn money and that greats and by all means don't stop doing it. But sometimes it just feels good to do something for other people and this literally will only take a few minutes to setup and you can help people continuously without any future effort put in.