Golem, and ambitious new project released on the 10th of April, 2018, allows the users to rent the CPU power that they are not using for creating digital imagery. Essentially, it’s a platform that lets others make use of the compute’s excess power.
A Market for Swapping Power
It took three years and fourteen implementations for the Golem project to go live. In 2016, the project rose 280 000 ETH (approximately, $340 million), and its GNT token was sold out in 20 minutes. There was a significant amount of interest on behalf of the investors since this ethereum app project was among the earliest generations of its kind.
The long delay in delivering the app, however, received some inevitable criticism. Golem’s founder, Julian Zawistowski, says it’s typical for the development of software, and, in particular, for blockchain, to underestimate the complexity of what needs to be done. Zawistowski says, “You always underestimate how difficult it is, and this was obviously the case with us.”
Golem has still not reached its final shape. However, the mainnet launch demonstrates that the app is, finally, very much alive. Currently, the CGI is created with the open-source software Blender that allows creating visual effects, animated films, interactive applications as well as video games. Golem exchanges the computational power for GNT via an interface that is directly connected to Blender.
The current release was named Golem Brass Beta. It aims at trying out the technology in the conditions of a real market, using the real money. As Zawistowski put it, “We have to see how it behaves in the wild,”
Piotr “Viggith” Janiuk, Golem’s co-founder and the CTO of the company, says “The release is there to prove to us and everyone that we can actually deliver something that can run on mainnet and that’s really usable. And, well, it is.”
From Brass to Machine Learning
Golem Brass Beta functions through a software client, connecting the “providers” (the ones that are selling the CPU power) and “requestors” (the ones who want to rent it) in the network.
“Providers” receive small subtasks, which make a complete computational picture when put together. These subtasks are sent via the peer-to-peer network. After the users have computed their subtasks, they return the results which are molded together. The “Requestors” then pay for using other’s power. All of these interactions occur on the network between the nodes.
Golem is not actually built on the blockchain, but it uses Ethereum for GNT (its token), and for agreeing on the token transactions.
The app’s creators hope to see it develop “to a point where we have the Golem which is perfect and self-contained and modular”, so that the computations would be done “in a matter of seconds”.
In future, the company plans to build a dedicated Blender plugin to eliminate an extra step. An even bigger ambition is to let the network provide the resources for machine learning. AS Jainuk stated, “We definitely need to move in the direction of machine learning. This is something that is suited to Golem pretty well,”
Long Road to Perfection
The long time it took to release the Golem is explained y the difficulties in production that could not be entirely anticipated when the project was first conceived. The development team had to venture into the yet uncharted territories, and, of course, extra attention needed to be paid to security. As Jainuk put it, “There can be no holes because you’re risking someone else’s money.”
Dividing the computational tasks into subtasks and reconnecting them later presented some of the greatest difficulties. Also, verifying the correctness of computation was particularly tricky to develop for certain kinds of computations, while with some cryptocurrencies it went easily.
The fact that platform apps cause Thereum transaction backlogs and the growth of the fees was not helping either. Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s creator, commented on the issue when speaking to an audience in South Korea, that the scaling challenges “screwed” the makers of the applications.
Jainuk also acknowledged the problem, saying that the decentralized solutions are still some steps away from even beginning to resemble the production-grade solutions. Zawinowski, in turn, compared the situation which we have regarding infrastructure and web development today is to what it was like in the nineties, noting that now there is a huge number of tools that the developers can choose from, while some decades ago people had no choice but to start from scratch.
However, sometimes starting from the very beginning is exactly what needs to be done. According to Zawinowski, often it is necessary to actually invent the wheel to solve the problems at hand.
