When you’re in the Salad Kitchen, time tastes a little bit different. Treasured gaming hours—those moments spent mercking kids on hot mics, puzzling our way out of dungeons, or exploring the unknown vistas of the map—are more readily savored just knowing our PCs won’t get lonesome when we return to reality.
There they sit, quietly purring, dreaming up new rewards for their loving owners. The little scamps.
This time last year, who would have thought that hundreds of thousands of people might soon be thinking the same thing? Let’s push pause to appreciate everything the indomitable Salad Chefs achieved in 2021.
Community Growth
These past twelve months have certainly crowded the Kitchen. Our computesharing network is serving 950% more people than it did in all of 2020—and the newcomers came hungry! Together the Salad Chefs claimed a whopping $3.49M in value and redeemed over 3.2 million digital rewards* from the Salad Storefront in 2021.
In those 365 short days, our community also managed to earn 3.18 billion experience points. That means each and every Salad user joined a colossal effort to share 6,054 years of computer processing.
We’re now the world’s most distributed supercomputer, and we’re still in our salad days. But any chef worth their salt knows: the real magic of the Kitchen lies in its ability to dish it out.
*Including rewards issued as Bonuses during Salad Seasons and Community Challenges.
Charitable Contributions
Salad users collectively made over 60,000 individual charitable donations in 2021. In addition to their contributions to the many charities we support via the Salad Storefront, our Chefs doled out seriously generous portions in the fall and winter.
During the ScreamTrees Community Challenge, Salad Chefs joined us in raising a Halloween helping of $3,100 for #TeamTrees—because there’s nothing spookier than a world without trees!
Then, a month later, they tripled down in our Growvember 2021 charity campaign. In just thirty days our community rallied to raise $9,630 for environmental charities around the world, including another $5,091 for the reforestation efforts of #TeamTrees.
The Chefs do truly amazing work—but they still make plenty of time for play.
Season 2 In Review
When Salad Season 2 began, we explained how thousands of user responses guided us in cooking up this season’s fresh new features and remixed challenges. As we bid adieu to our second Salad Season, we’d like to thank our loyal community once more for helping us perfect the recipe.
Over 175,000 unique Salad Chefs took a spin on the latest levels, earning a total of 812,000 Bonuses, games, and rewards from our seasonal bill of fare. Though only 413 legendary individuals completed all 20 XP Levels in Salad Season 1, we’re pleased to announce that 1,489 Chefs are joining that stouthearted cohort in Season 2.
Congratulations to all those who reached Level 20! If you have already claimed your Level 20 Bonus, look out for your exclusive rewards to arrive in the next few weeks.
Season 2 Giveaway
We hope you saved room for dessert. One lucky Season 2 Giveaway winner has won a state-of-the-art Nanoleaf Shapes RGB light panel kit—a coveted, glow up grand prize that comes drizzled with Salad Balance.
We’ve also issued $100 Salad Balance Bonuses to one hundred runners-up. All told that’s ten thousand smackers to satisfy even the most fiendish loot lust.
Thanks to everyone who participated! If you made off with a prize, don’t forget to share your latest sweet redeems in the #show-off-your-earnings channel of the SaladChefs Discord.
2021 Events
This year, Salad introduced some long-awaited wishlist features, overcame obstacles, and partied down with the people of the Kitchen. Here’s just a sampling of some of the biggest events and developments of 2021.
Community Challenges
This year we welcomed Community Challenges, a series of biweekly, limited-time missions that offer extra rewards for everyone in the Kitchen. Salad Chefs joined us in donating to important causes, helped us test new features, and even amplified our signal on social media.
For every Challenge conquered, our users earned supplemental earnings boosts, exclusive profile avatars, and other exclusive perks. Soon after, our click-and-claim Bonus system made it easier than ever to enjoy the fruits of your labor.
Media Milestones
In April the official SaladChefs community server earned its verification on Discord. What finally tipped the scales? Perhaps it was the combined might of more than 43,000 individuals (and counting!). Later on the SaladChefs Twitter followed suit, going offish with a snazzy blue check.
Those badges might seem meaningless to a headshotter dripping with Call of Duty emblems, but they’re important battle standards in the fight for decentralization. As more and more legacy platforms begin to acknowledge the strength of our Kitchen, we’ll be able to show millions more people how to profit from their PC.
Salad is too legit to quit, and now the world knows it.
Salad Season 1
Salad users earn XP for every minute of work shared with our network, but for a while, it didn’t do much else. Salad Season 1 turned that XP from an inert cheevo into a full-blown leveling system! For the first time ever, Salad Chefs earned games, subscriptions, and Salad Balance boosts just for running Salad, no matter what hardware they brought to the party.
Mapping the Metaverse
Over the summer, our community journeyed into the Metaverse. Their mission? Save the six Chefs we had lost on the other side. As part of the #MappingtheMetaverse Summer Series event, everyone who shared our featured articles earned a rare profile avatar featuring one of those intrepid explorers.
Summer Series
The original #MtM articles harkened to a more aspirational time when we saw major gaming companies as compatriots on a quest to craft the next era of video games—and the Internet itself. Reminisce with us in the six O.G. entries:
- What Is the Metaverse?
- Roblox Puts the “Me” in Metaverse
- Epic Games vs. Fortified Philosophies
- Are We Already in the Metaverse?
- The User-Generated Civilization of Roblox
- Fortnite Built the Metaverse On-Ramp
Winter Series
Now, things have taken a darker turn. The ongoing Mapping the Metaverse Winter Series covers the cultural and technological impact that centralization may have on the burgeoning Metaverse if left unchecked. Catch up with our call to arms below:
- Centralization Is a Systems Design Problem
- Decentralize or Be Destroyed!
- Fear the Facebook Metaverse
15K Fall Series
In October, local gamers joined us at Esposure Studios in Dallas, TX, for the championship round of the 15K Fall Series NBA2K tournament. Pre-qualifying teams sliced into Salad’s $15,000 prize purse, leading to the ultimate showdown between No Tolerance and Farewell Gaming on #TheMainCourt.
Congratulations to No Tolerance on their victory—and bravo to Farewell Gaming for making it a real nail-biter! We look forward to supporting esports education with our friends at Esposure in years to come.
Holiday Minecraft Meetup
We got the chance to meet even more Salad Chefs at our holiday Minecraft block party. In a winter wonderland lovingly designed by the Salad MC fan community, members of the Salad team squared off against our users in a friendly build battle.
Cozy up to some of our creative collaborations in this highlight reel!
12 Days of FRAGMAS
As the year drew to a close, we introduced our community to the 12 Days of FRAGMAS, Salad’s own hodgepodge holiday. Over twelve days, Salad Chefs could earn a free AAA game title from our selection of festive frags just by running the desktop application.
While dishing out the prizes, we asked our winners to tell us the true meaning of FRAGMAS. Here’s what we learned:
FRAGMAS doesn’t have a true meaning. It’s a feeling; a feeling no one can describe but everyone wants. It’s a #winnerspov holiday, where every Chef has the chance to see their day brightened with a gift they can use and cherish until their hands are tired.
We’re not crying. You’re crying.
Coming Soon
It gives us the warm and fuzzies just knowing that we get to rub elbows with the Salad Chefs. We’re always trying to find new ways to reward the tireless efforts of our community. Keep an eye out for even more giveaways, meetups, and events in the year to come!
As we embark on our journey into 2022, the Salad Storefront is well-stocked with thousands of games, gift cards, hardware peripherals, and more digital rewards. But we’re aware that things could be tidier! With more hands joining us in the Kitchen this year, we’ll be better able to maximize the freshness of all our ingredients and revitalize our menu with something for every palate. Stay tuned for a few surprise updates to the Salad Storefront.
*In case you missed it, our feature request forum has migrated to the SaladChefs subreddit. Please head there to submit suggestions for features and rewards using the “Feature Request” flair, or drop a comment in the #feature-requests channel of the SaladChefs Discord.*
The Future of Salad
They say, “Mighty oaks from little acorns grow,” and look at how far our little Salad app has come. It makes us wistful to remember the days of Offerwalls, the rewards carousel, and even the familiar keydowns of salad.io. How differently time moves when you’re in the Salad Kitchen!
We launched salad.com as a testament to our mission. If we are to build the easiest, most trusted way to share compute resources, we need to ready the Kitchen for millions more gamers and everyday individuals from all corners of the world.
Our engineers have been working diligently to introduce streamlined earnings reporting, improved balancing, and smarter algorithms, so that Salad Chefs new and old can derive even greater value from their PCs. As we prepare to bring millions more people together as the vital ingredients in our salad, it’s our steadfast goal to find the right job for a lazy computer.
Only together can we save the Internet.
We’ve got so much to share in 2022, including all-new, compute-sharing workloads and even more ways to use Salad Balance. Until then, Happy Chopping.
If you’d like to learn more about the people working at Kitchen HQ—or see what we’ve got cooking on the backburner—check out these staff features from SaladCast:
