Folding Forum

I fold with Team Atto now with my piddly GTX 1650. About 600,000 PPD.
I thought i'd have a look at the team numbers.
Looks like a couple of users have invested their entire lives savings into renting GPU's in the cloud. I say GPU's. More like, they rented a supercomputer.

https://folding.extremeoverclocking.com ... &t=1066107

Just saw this yesterday, that 1.7 billion player came out of nowhere about to overtake my five years plus thirty billion in a couple of days.

Ouch

Yeah, I noticed it the other day. I think it's fairly insane to invest so much in cloud folding unless it's profitable. Even then it seems like a big chunk of money to throw at something all at once.

Being that most of these extreme cases are those on the crypto or coin based teams I can only assume they are hoping to cash in at some point and actually profit. But some people on other teams already fold some fairly insane numbers as well.

I was also very curious, so I did some rough numbers (more like I went down the rabbit hole)...

At some point, that user was folding with 37 clients, averaging slightly over 40m PPD per client, therefore likely 37 5090s.

Cheapest 16 x 5090 I've found online go for ~$10/hour. 2 clusters = 32 => ~$20/hour.
Cheapest 4 x 5090 ~$1.5/hour.

So, 36 5090s would be ~$516 per day (best case scenario).

The user was getting ~3,000,000 Atto coins per day on his best days (~2billion+ PPD).

Atto was trading at around $0.0001 (now it's a bit lower). Traded at $0.0002 for a very brief period of time.

So, best case scenario, the user made $300 per day. Basically, not close to braking even.

Finally, the user's folding power varied significantly over time (not constantly folding).

Ergo, my conclusion, it is someone with access to a lot of GPUs for other tasks (AI/Machine learning), and put them to fold whenever the GPUs were idling.

As a side piece of knowledge gained, I learnt about Atto (and banano, etc.), which I knew nothing about before, and I think those crypto projects are pretty cool (distributing / rewarding with coins by f@h), as they end up adding folding power instead of just wasting electricity.

Don't worry too much, it will be another shooting star ...

They have already stopped folding, at least for now. Possibly someone with access to a new bank of servers and was running folding to stress test them.

enroscado wrote: ↑Sun Aug 24, 2025 12:43 am As a side piece of knowledge gained, I learnt about Atto (and banano, etc.), which I knew nothing about before, and I think those crypto projects are pretty cool (distributing / rewarding with coins by f@h), as they end up adding folding power instead of just wasting electricity.

Just a clarification, they do not get coins for folding by or from F@h. Those are strictly team awards, Folding@home neither provides, supports, nor endorses any cryptocurrency as part of folding. The project just awards points. There is a statement on this posted by the director of the project - https://foldingathome.org/2019/01/14/fo ... urrencies/