Use Cases, Technology and User Experience
What is the use case of the token?
Golem has the vision to become the world’s super computer. It wants to connect the world’s computational power on a next generation sharing economy market place. Typical use cases for Golem are computer power intensive computational operations such as Machine Learning or scientific computation.
Golem allows users, called providers, to lend the computational power of their devices to the crowd. At the same time it enables other users, called requestors, to purchase these computational resources. In that sense Golem is a blockchain based marketplace that is connecting two sides of a market. The market forces will determine the price of computational power based on supply and demand.
What does the technology behind look like?
Golem is a peer-to-peer network for computational power built on the Ethereum blockchain. It plans to offer a Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) to its customers. At the same time third-party developers will be able to submit software to the Application Registry and monetize their software through Golem.
In today’s IT landscape big centralized companies such as Amazon Web Services provide the computational needs that Golem wants to offer through blockchain technology. Since the beginning of Golem Network a number of other projects have started to operate in the same field. Among them is DeepBrain Chain which also is building a platform at the intersection of cloud computing and blockchain technology. This puts Golem under pressure to advance with their development road map in order to keep their early mover advantage.
How is the User Experience?
Different from Augur, Golem has not yet launched its platform. This means it is not yet possible to request and supply computational power as foreseen in the original Golem white paper. However, users can already purchase the Golem token in anticipation of the network launch. Golem tokens can be stored in any ERC-20 compatible wallet.
Score: 7/10
Team & Developer Community
The Golem team is mostly based in Poland and led by Julian Zawistowski, who graduated in Economics at Warsaw School of Economics.
Piotrs Janiuk is the CTO and co-founder of Golem. Before working at Golem he completed a Master in Mathematics and Computer Science at Warsaw University. He counts with several years of experience in software development.
Andrzej Regulski is the COO and third co-founder of Golem. Just as Julian he counts with a Master Degree in Economics from Warsaw University and with several years of experience in the tech and innovation environment.
Golem has a broad range of developers working on the implementation of the project. Imapp is a Polish software company which is the largest contractor of Golem for developing the Golem application. It is also the company where the idea for Golem originated and was started by Julian Zawistowski before he came up with Golem. Since Golem is not yet fully functional the platform adoption by third party developers has yet to occur.
Score: 6/10
Token Economics
Golem is an Ethereum based ERC-20 token which is called GNT (Golem Network Token). The token is envisaged to empower the decentralized application that the Golem Network represents. The Golem token must be used by requestors to purchase computational services on the platform. Also software developers that offer the solutions on the platform will be rewarded with the GNT token. Once the platform is functional the token will be used for a number of other transactions on the Golem Network. The supply of tokens is limited to the amount of tokens created during the crowdfunding; there will be no token inflation. Golem can be classified as a utility token and some recognized cryptocurrency investors such as Mutlicoincap have expressed their concerns regarding the future economic value of utility tokens.
Score: 5/10
Progress History, Achievements and Road Map
The Golem team started to work on their masterplan back in 2014. The project is one of the first Ethereum based innovations so to say. The Golem mainnet launch occurred in April 2018, but did not yet bring a functional product. Currently Golem is working to integrate Intel’s SGX technology in their platform. Looking at the Golem road map a number of code names is used to refer to major project milestones and internal developer teams. One of the next milestones should be Brass which will bring improvements to Golem mainnet. The next step after Brass will be Clay which will bring a better architecture and more features. Thereafter the Stone and Iron releases should follow. Further improvements are assigned to project teams but it is unclear when Golem will eventually be able to deliver a fully functional product that is suited for mainstream users.
Score: 6/10
Community Strength
The Golem subreddit counts with more than 20,000 subscribers and has a very active community. The official Golem account on Twitter has more than 145,000 followers.
Score: 7/10
Conclusion
Similar to Ethereum itself Golem is a super promising and exciting piece of blockchain technology, but at the same time a protocol who’s implementation seems never-ending. Just as with Ethereum it is extremely difficult for Golem to forecast when technical milestones will be implemented. Since Golem is built on Ethereum the success of the platform will be linked to the success of Ethereum itself. Golem already has been among the top 10 coins on coinmarketcap and it is definitely a token to consider once adoption of the platform is in sight. Nevertheless investors need to consider the problematic around utility tokens, since it is not entirely clear whether the platform needs its own token and whether the GNT token can maintain its economic value once it is actually used for platform services.
Total Score: 6/10
? URL: https://golem.network/
? Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/GolemProject/
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* The information contained in this article is for education purpose only and not financial advice. Do your own research before making any investment decisions.
(2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
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I like your review, just don’t understand how come Golem still don’t have an actual product…
For actual adoption I would bet on HyperNet - its API based on the principle of Distributed Average Consensus (DAC), which would allow for much lower cost of DLT 3.0 distributed computing.