To get to #1 on Stanford's Folding@home DCN*, the Curecoin team beat out several large corporate sponsored teams along the way (HP, EVGA, and Google to name a few). Many team members leverage "merge-folding" to earn tokens from both Curecoin and Foldingcoin (a very important peer group). This serves as a welcome layer of decentralization in the research token space. Both tokens trade for bitcoin, but are also spendable in burgeoning markets on coinpayments.net, and useful in p2p trades similar to bitcoin.
Curecoin uses a hybrid blockchain model (pre-mined pool, PoS and PoW), while Foldingcoin leverages the Counterparty model. The tokens were designed to give GPU and ASIC bitcoin miners the opportunity to "do good" using their legacy equipment, while helping attract casual participants (gamers and IT workers) to supplement the electric power used for the computations. The paradigm has grown beyond the original intent — with a new goal to dramatically accelerate the underlying research through competition over a controlled supply.
An outstanding byproduct of Curecoin has resulted in gifts to charities amounting to tens of thousands of dollars (in bitcoin equivalence) from the non-profit sponsored "Curecoin Project". The team has created a hybrid folding cloud - funded by donations as part of a comprehensive giving system (allowing support via fiat, Amazon Smile, token donations as well as direct donation via computational power!).
http://www.digitaljournal.com/pr/3462503
*Stanford's Folding@home uses global communities of PC and Mac user/contributors (aka citizen scientists) to help researchers investigate computational drug design for cancers, neurocognitive disorders, infectious diseases, as well as research into other aspects of computational biology (including the use of cloud, deep learning and AI). The open-source data generated by the community is used by researchers, and cross-referenced in over 3500 scholarly articles.
**Curecoin rewards are totally independent from the university.