How It Works

How we raise money for great causes – and the prize draw

Charity Engine takes enormous, expensive computing jobs and chops them into 1000s of small pieces, each simple enough for a home PC to work on as a background task. Once each PC has finished its part of the puzzle, it sends back the correct answer and earns some money for charity – and for the prize fund. (It also earns more chances to win.) 

Where does the money come from? Science and industry. The grid is rented like a giant supercomputer or cloud platform, then we share the profits 33-33-33 between ourselves, the charities, and the lucky prize winners. 

Charity Engine typically adds less than 10 cents per day to a PC's energy costs and can generate $10-$20 for charity – and the prize draws – for each $1 of electricity consumed.

It is the most efficient way to donate to charity ever invented.

How the prize winner is chosen

When Charity Engine announces a prize draw, the List of Entries is published and a date for the draw chosen in advance. 

The List of Entries shows each user's unique ID number and how many prize draw entries they have in total. Everyone can verify their own place on the list and the block of numbers assigned to their entries. Any mistakes must be reported within 48 hours, then the list is final.

The total number of entries is expected to be a 9 or 10 digit number, so we choose one randomly by combining the last digits of the following stock market closing prices on the pre-chosen date:

Tokyo (Nikkei 225), Hong Kong (Hang Seng), Mumbai (Sensex), Frankfurt (DAX), and finally New York (Dow Jones). Each is in a different time zone, so the winning number is revealed one digit at a time over the course of the day.

The prize winning number is chosen right-to-left, or 'smallest first'. If the last stock market chooses a number that is too high for the final digit, we cycle around the stock markets again until a valid number is chosen. Human hands are never involved.

Last digits of stock market closing prices are completely random and mathematically impossible to predict or tamper with in any way. That's why we use them for Charity Engine.

Stay Green!

Please help us make Charity Engine the most energy-efficient grid on the planet by turning your PC off when not in use. We only want spare computing time from PCs that are switched on anyway. Keep it green!

About Us

  • The Team

    Mark McAndrew, Founder
    Matt Blumberg, Co-Founder
    Mark Roberts, Legal
    Robert Pearce, Finance
    Phil Robertson, Marketing
    GridRepublic:
    Matt Blumberg, Tristan Olive, Rytis Slatkevičius
  • Partners

    BOINC
    GridRepublic
    Wolfram Research
    University of Manchester
    International Desktop Grid Federation
    Cloud Advisory Council
    UberCloud HPC Experiment
    OpenFog Consortium
  • Advisors

    Prof David Anderson, Founder and Architect, BOINC Project, U.C. Berkeley
    Prof Stephen Wolfram, Wolfram Research
    Anil Hansjee, ex-head of M&A, Google EMEA
    Michael Geer, Founder of CauseCart, previously founder of Badoo
    Andrew Romans, General Partner, The Founders Club
    Dr Ethan Siegel, astrophysicist and award-winning blogger
    Dr David Gorski, oncologist and award-winning blogger
    Andreas Bauer, MD, four40 Ventures Ltd
  • The Company

    Charity Engine® is owned and operated by the Worldwide Computer Company Ltd, Piccadilly House, 49 Piccadilly, Manchester, M1 2AP (UK Company No. 6723910).

    We are signed up to the same ethical policies as our charity partners, so the grid is off-limits to any organisation they don't want using it. Only the good guys can use Charity Engine.

Contact Us

Feel free to contact us with any queries and we will get back to you as soon as possible.

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