Golem – Decentralized Supercomputer

https://golem.network

Golem is the first truly decentralized supercomputer, creating a global market for computing power. It’s made up of the combined power of user’s machines, from personal laptops to entire datacenters.

Golem is based upon Ethereum platform. And has its own crypto-currency on top of it named Golem Network Token (GNT).

The requesters , request for shared hardware usage using GNT (Golem Network Token). This request is sent to Golem Transaction Framework. Golem Transaction Framework co-ordinates execution and computing resources through Golem Infrastructure. The GNT Golem Network Token is only partially-ERC20-compliant.

The other channel of making income is through payment of software usage.

If you watched The Silicon Valley Season 4 EP1,  Richard suggests an idea for a  “new internet” based on decentralized computing power. Looks like they might have read about the decentralized app eco-system , especially “Golem”.

Around November 2016, Golem raised 8.6 m. A great read exists on the white paper of Golem here.

courtsey: Golem White paper

Any interested party is free to create and deploy software to the Golem network by publishing it to the Application Registry. Together with the Transaction Framework, developers can also extend and customize the payment mechanism resulting in unique mechanisms for monetizing software.

Looks like the initial target market is the high computational CGI rendering in a distributed architecture.

The good:

  • Golem is an open-sourced project. Link
  • Golem can be the next wave of companies which can significantly crush the domination of Amazon Webservices and Microsoft Azure and other central computing resources.
  • Golem can provide a high performant platform for small and simple applications to complex ones. Since the cost of scaling will no longer be upon app developers.
  • Golem if implemented properly, can be more reliable and scalable in terms of hacker attacks or DOS attacks.
  • Golem might create a completely new way to monetize software by deploying the software on the platform and charging per execution.

The bad:

  • Golem has multiple complexities, challenges and sub-systems. The team would definitely need to stretch their efforts in order not to bite off more than they can chew.
  • There needs to be a sample , MVP of Golem in the market for validation.
  • Reliability and scalability needs to be validated with practical use cases.
  • Initially the number of providers might be low which might cause less demand, so there is the same chicken and egg problem.
  • Golem needs to provide solid use cases or markets where it can be very useful and cost saving etc.
  • Essentially Golem feels like a packaged framework of Docker, IPFS , Geth and OpenExr , OpenSSL. Instead of building integrations from scratch.
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