Whatever the opinion on the future of science research based digital currencies, after 2 years of floundering between $0.01 and $0.02 US
... the level of interest on the exchanges has been fun to watch over the last couple of weeks:

CureCoin: https://poloniex.com/exchange#...
FoldingCoin: https://poloniex.com/exchange#...
GridCoin: https://poloniex.com/exchange#...

Based on a previous post that now appears pulled/blocked, it did bring up a common misconception about Folding@home papers and potential patents.

First off, all the research results are made public and referenced by over three thousand studies and academic articles all over the world (you can see it on Google Scholar, just type in Folding@home). Many of those studies don't relate to pharmaceutical research at all, but because it's all life science, they might concentrate on water desalinization, custom enzymes for testing , and even cover AI, machine learning, cloud computing studies.

The research is just beginning to reach critical mass (remember it was conceived to be a long term endeavor), they've actually been able to take a resulting Alzheimer's drug compound up to Phase II human trials, but stopped due to unexpected toxicity. They are now working on re-purposing the compound and setting up another trial so all that research doesn't go to waste.

Second point; any patent that Stanford is able to file based on this research MUST be sold under the rules of the Bayh-Dole act. This would help fund further research and likely attract grants for other distributed computing projects. The corporate entity purchasing patents under Bayh-Dole is required to make a best effort to bring that medicine to market (or face losing their patent). Now there are ways companies can manipulate their IP, but that's a discussion for another thread. There is a trend in the software open source industry where corporations would rather work with Universities under an open source license agreement rather than own the patent outright. This may be a new option for small pharmaceutical companies going forward.

If I'm wrong, perhaps someone from the Pande group could further clarify ...

The CureCoin project was created to help subsidize donor's computational power - and to create a burgeoning alternative to carbon positive crypto-currencies located in centralized mining silos in China (CureCoin retains an 18% SHA-256 mining layer to secure the network and help SHA miners transition from bitcoin mining to folding proteins). The only ASIC designed for protein folding as of 2016 is the Anton Supercomputer.