Building a Sustainable Blockchain — Proof of Useful Work & Academic on Flux.
Flux is working hard on making proof of useful work (PoUW) a reality. But we’re not alone in this great endeavor to build sustainable solutions for blockchain. We’re partnering with the Western Switzerland University of Applied Sciences in Geneva to develop PoUW to the benefit of all current and future proof of work blockchains and to research communities and others who can utilize the computational resources generated through PoUW.
A while back Flux announced that we started development on ‘Proof of useful work’ (PoUW).
Since then Flux has been working hard on making PoUW a reality. The impact Proof of Useful Work will have on both crypto and traditional industries will be tremendous. It is one of the biggest projects that Flux is undertaking and has the potential to transform how we view Proof of Work blockchains and solve the current sustainability issues that are often subject to negative attention from blockchain critics.
As an important step in PoUw development, we are proud to announce a partnership with the Western Switzerland University of Applied Sciences in Geneva, Switzerland (HES) to help test out Proof of Useful Work concepts in a research setting.
What is Proof of Useful Work
In a Proof of Work (PoW) blockchain, the chain is secured by miners performing randomized calculations in parallel in a race to come up with the correct answer. These calculations, while useful for securing the chain, serve no real-world purpose and are often a target for criticism of blockchain technology as the power consumption required to perform this proof of work can be extensive.
Proof of Useful Work (PoUW) is the solution to this. Flux is looking to harness the vast amount of compute power its GPU miners use to secure the blockchain by getting it to solve real-world problems instead of the random problems used in traditional PoW chains.
The types of real-world problems that could be used range from encoding video to predicting the weather to helping research teams with their machine learning models. This last use case is the focus of our partnership announced today.
Flux proudly presents AcademicOnFlux
AcademicOnFlux is a research project that explores contributing idle resources at the Western Switzerland University of Applied Sciences in Geneva (HES) via PoUW towards academic researchers’ machine learning projects.
First to use AcademicOnFlux will be the university’s DeepMining Research Lab. They will be able to take advantage of the implementation of PoUW’s replacement of random number lookups with useful algorithms, as well as the ability to share hardware resources.
HES has embarked on this six-month research project as part of a call for strategic projects focussing on sustainability within the university. The goal of the project is to assess both the technical and economic feasibility of sharing dormant compute resources within the research lab. This will involve an investigation into the opportunities and needs of other researchers within the HES, and the advantages of utilizing the decentralized AcademicOnFlux over centralized offerings such as AWS.
These traditional cloud offerings, while being very flexible, usually come with a prohibitive cost model for research use-cases given the variance and scale of the compute resources required. Alternatively, shared hypercomputing solutions don’t have the flexibility required by researchers and operate on limited amounts of resources and limited availability due to them being shared between multiple teams.
The main goal of AcademicOnFlux will be to share unused compute resources with the wider research community and to use the value of the Flux token to rent additional resources during peak levels of activity.
Over the six-month period, the team will assess if this approach will make the university's compute resources more profitable over time and extend the lifespan of the equipment by limiting new purchases.
This will provide invaluable input for the continued PoUW development. We’ll both get useful data to inform and improve the development cycle, but also a live test of PoUW that will serve as an example of what the potential of PoUW is and help introduce the concept to the World.
We look forward to sharing more information on PoUW developments in the future.
Learn more about the Flux ecosystem and how it’s innovating blockchain
Flux aims to push the boundaries of blockchain and Web3 technology. PoUW is a flagship project for blockchain innovation, but it’s not the only interesting thing Flux is working on. Flux is actively building the infrastructure for the decentralized internet of the future, Web3 an internet ‘by the people, for the people.
Flux is fueled by community, so we invite you to come to take part. All are welcome, it doesn’t matter if you’re just interested in technology, an investor, a developer, or just like to make crypto memes all day. Flux needs all kinds of people to participate in the decentralized future.
Come check out the official Flux website hosted on the Flux decentralized network. Learn about the Flux ecosystem and see what’s on offer.
If you want to witness what Flux has built so far, go visit the Flux network dashboard and see how many nodes we’ve got online, check out the massive resources available to the network, see what decentralized apps are running and what the current rewards are for Flux node operators.
And also, please do stop by the Flux discord to meet the Flux team and community and discuss all things Flux, we’re always on the lookout for new community members or developers.
