Massive™ is a tool used by app developers to let you opt in to pay for premium features, content, and services with a little of your unused computing resources.

Developers who use Massive are required to present clear offers in this format so you can make informed decisions about whether or not to accept:

Massive is like Airbnb or Turo for your computer. Rather than letting you share your home or vehicle when you’re not using them, Massive lets you share any unused computing resources you have. In exchange, app developers give you access to their premium features.

To guarantee that you get a fair deal, Massive is opt-in only and apps you opt in with must include tooling so you can monitor and control resource consumption. When active, Massive consumes resources unnoticeably in the background by analyzing anonymous telemetry data and compensates developers without ever collecting your personally identifiable info.

Opting in to Massive unlocks premium apps and features. Massive provides a payment alternative that avoids the hidden productivity, autonomy, privacy, bandwidth, processing, and electricity costs of ads and lack of inclusivity of paywalls (and provides the developers of your apps with a monetization alternative that can fund better features than do ads’ low average revenue per user and paywalls’ low average conversion rate). We’ve blogged about these incumbent costs.

Massive doesn’t develop consumer apps but has partnered with many developers who offer to let you upgrade with Massive in their apps. Depending on your geolocation, you’ll get such offers in apps like Boom 3D for Windows and Digg Desktop.

Massive finds and uses otherwise unused resources, possibly including your CPU, GPU, RAM, storage, and bandwidth but never your personal info. After opting in, you can monitor and control this resource use from Massive’s interface.

Massive combines the small amounts of resources contributed by users like you into a supercomputer that funds app features by mining cryptocurrency, decentralizing blockchain infrastructure, running scientific simulations, and performing general distributed tasks.

Cryptocurrency, as a new, lightly regulated asset class, is a frequent object of media sensationalism and misinformation, price speculation, get-rich-quick schemes, outright scams, and other irrational behavior, but cryptocurrency mining involves the mundane execution of cryptographic functions, which are simply hard math problems, to output mostly random numbers that verify transactions autonomously.

The transactions can represent direct financial transactions or more abstract ones like the serving of this site’s pages to you. The verification performed by mining replaces the traditional role of a central authority so has the potential to democratize legacy systems.

Cryptojacking is the criminal use of a victim’s computer or device to mine cryptocurrency without their consent, which became a prevalent malware exploit in 2017 and 2018 before being detected by antivirus engines.

Apps that include Massive are forced, technically and contractually, to expose prominent opt-in offers and usage controls and to respect Massive’s resource limits. Any effort by an app developer to circumvent these measures that we detected or were made aware of would result in our immediate termination of the developer’s right to include Massive.

Massive mines from a basket of ASIC-resistant cryptocurrencies like Monero, based on what’s most efficient at a given time.

There are plenty of alternative tools unaffiliated with Massive that are available to mine cryptocurrency, including XMR-Stak and XMRig.

Cryptocurrency mining let us bootstrap a distributed supercomputer that could pay developers enough to ditch their in-app ads. The network has achieved sufficient scale that cryptomining is becoming a smaller and smaller proportion of how Massive uses resources.

Massive is designed to be unnoticeable when active, using minimal resources in the background during low-usage conditions. You can monitor, pause, or opt out of this resource use at any time from Massive’s interface.

Massive consumes electricity when running like all computer programs. Although electricity prices are different worldwide, Massive cryptomines and performs other distributed tasks profitably on average so costs an average of a few cents per month to use.

As of 2021, this use (and all the electricity ever used by our company) is carbon neutral through the purchase of offset credits. We’ll be posting details about our emissions calculations and neutralization methodology on our blog in the upcoming year.

Massive uses minimal computing resources, totaling an average of a few cents’ worth of monthly electricity consumption, so should minimally affect the lifetime of modern hardware. One day, Massive may even help extend the lifetime of older hardware by making obsolescent resources valuable again.

Massive doesn’t collect any personal info and executes all first- and third-party code in a sandboxed environment for further data protection. We comply with worldwide privacy regulations, including the GDPR in the EU, the CCPA in the US, the LGPD in Brazil, and the IT Act in India, and we work with antivirus vendors to make sure Massive is free of viruses and other malware (as shown by VirusTotal):

When prompted with an in-app offer to upgrade to premium features, content, or services with Massive, you can decide if you want to accept or not given the terms of the exchange.

Every app that includes Massive must also include usage controls directly in the app’s interface or in a standard system location. In Windows, open the usage controls from the app or click the Massive icon in your taskbar. In macOS, open the usage controls from the app or click the Massive icon in your menu bar. You can then opt in to, opt out of, monitor, pause, unpause, or quit Massive’s resource use:

In Windows, open the Start menu, go to Settings > Apps > Apps & features, choose the Massive app, then press the Uninstall button. In macOS, open the Applications folder then drag and drop the Massive app onto the Trash icon in your Dock.

You can pause, quit, opt out of, or uninstall Massive anytime. What happens after you do is at the discretion of the developers whose apps you opted in with, but usually you lose access to their features, content, or services. You can enable Massive again to restore your access.

Massive is developed by a team of privacy, security, systems, and interface experts.

We started Massive to give app and web users a payment alternative to the attention-grabbing, emotion-manipulating, privacy-violating experience of online advertising (and to give developers a monetization alternative to advertising’s minimal revenue per user). Our origin story details this reasoning.

Massive’s software is distributed with other software to eliminate or reduce costs to end-users and generate revenue for developers The installation of our engine is always by user opt-in. Some software packages require the Massive Engine to be active in order to use the software.  In these cases, disabling or removing the Massive engine will cause that software not to function. In other cases, Massive is a companion to the software and functions independently.  Please see the software’s End User Agreement to determine any dependencies.

Network resources will be used by our business partners to conduct research and business intelligence. Content will be filtered to protect the end-user from excessive, abusive, fraudulent, malicious, illegal, and risky behavior.  Network resources will be utilized in a manner similar to other computing resources so as to not impact the end user’s activities and will be capped so as to not be excessive in accordance with Internet Service Providers standards.

We take the average measurement of resources utilized during the idol time.  While the Massive engine is in use, there can and will be spikes of resources used when calculations and other activities are initiated, this spike will be temporary.  The end goal is for the Engine’s activities to be unnoticed by the user of the computer.

At this time we have received reports of two copies of the Massive engine running when AdBlock Fast is installed alongside other products using the Massive engine.  This can lead to multiple excessive spikes in resource utilization.  It is recommended that the Massive Engine only be enabled for AdBlock Fast or Other applications at this time.  We are engineering a fix for this conflict in future versions