Salad Technologies is inviting PC gamers to help build the world's largest supercomputer with their idle rigs in return for digital rewards, following milestone performance metrics on its distributed computing network. The company is launching a marketplace that will lend the combined processing power of its PC gamer user base to partners' advanced computing tasks. In time, private individuals running Salad's application will compete against multimillion dollar supercomputers.

Since its founding in 2018, Salad has made "Chefs" of more than 250,000 PC gamers, leveraging the idle processing power of their hardware to validate blockchain transactions through an open-source desktop app. While away from the keyboard, Salad users share compute resources to earn rewards value for games, gift cards, and subscriptions from a library of more than 15,000 digital rewards.In the last three months alone, these "Chefs" have collectively generated $500,000 in rewards value and redeemed over 40,000 unique rewards in the process. With average network performance steady at more than 30 petaFLOPS, Salad's computational "Kitchen" is already besting the world's ninth-fastest supercomputer, and peak performance periods have seen double that number.

To date, Salad's network has logged tens of millions of compute hours, boasting nearly 10,000 unique daily active users and a community of more than 20,000 fans in its Discord server. Simplicity has been key to Salad's rapid uptake. The zero-configuration app allocates users' compute resources the most profitable blockchain protocol available with just one click. And in the months ahead, gamers will see their rigs do more than mine cryptocurrency.

The latest activity benchmarks mean Salad's network can reliably service diversified workloads. Gamers may soon see their rigs powering innovations in fields as diverse as medical research, engineering, and artificial intelligence. Through Salad's forthcoming partner marketplace, users will get to pick from an à la carte menu of high-performance computing jobs and claim a share of the proceeds, effectively earning even more in their downtime.

Since a $3.5M investment round in December, the Salad team has been developing decentralized infrastructure that could enable owners of consumer hardware to collectively offer affordable alternatives to corporate web services, such as those offered by Amazon Web Services. The brand's newly-launched salad.com site signals its bid for a broader audience, and doubles as a tongue-in-cheek overture to the peer-to-peer fundamentals of the dotcom era.

"We aim to be the easiest, most trusted way to share compute," said Salad CEO Bob Miles. "Salad dotcom is our way of saying 'Everyone's welcome in the Kitchen.'"

The company is also working on a payment gateway known as SaladPay that enables users to make purchases across the web using value earned through the app. In time, Miles foresees "Pay With Your PC" as a universal option on e-commerce platforms.

Salad has already tapped niche gaming communities Xeno Gaming and Mantle.gg to debut early access SaladPay features. Though still in the alpha stage of development, their team is exploring promising integrations with streaming platforms and in-game downloadable content marketplaces.

Miles is sanguine about the opportunities ahead: "The consumer hardware market is massive. When we started Salad, there were around 400 million gaming rigs in the world, and most of them gathered dust for 22 hours a day. If you want to activate that kind of supply, you've got to show everyone how to make the most of their PC. This past year has really shown us what our Chefs can do, and we're stoked to see them get a crack at these diversified workloads and even bigger earnings down the road."