I thought Salad was doing distributed computing?

And you’re correct! Our long-term vision for Salad is to create a distributed computing network whose processing power rivals that of most supercomputers. However, for this vision to become a reality, we have to build a strong core of users who reliably run Salad for several hours daily before we can begin running HPC jobs on the network. Blockchain (mining) allows us to grow our user base, as it provides a reliable source of valuable work for user GPUs to perform.

We now also support Bandwidth Sharing in supported regions.

https://support.salad.com/article/253-what-is-bandwidth-sharing