AMA February 2021 Summary

Welcome to the Summary of our Winter AMA! It was an incredibly participated AMA with plenty of tough, interesting and challenging questions on several topics, which for us is a sign that our community is more vibrant and engaged than ever!

This summary will try to touch every major point, although you can always read the full answers on Reddit!

High level overview

On a very high level, at the moment we have three core areas of focus:

-MVP: validating, shipping and improving the MVP, as well as developing ways to overcome high gas price barriers

-Our community: improving our reach and increasing the number of projects built on top of Golem

-GLM: making sure that GLM is easily accessible on a wide variety of platforms for developers and providers

Future Developments

Several questions asked us about what the future holds for Golem, technical roadmaps and strategies.

To begin, as you know we have just released Alpha 4, which is a release candidate to be tested in production, and right now our priority is releasing Beta. In terms of future developments, a few priorities are worth mentioning. First of all, we will work on a browser-based implementation that will allow the requestor agents - and later even the whole yagna node - to be run within a web browser. This, it goes without saying, means that we can significantly expand out users-base. Moreover, taking into account our plans and user expectations, we will deliver: a VPN (virtual networks  among requestors and providers so that data can be exchanges without proxies) as it will open us up to many use cases; SGX techniques for privacy & trust will be coming soon; we will also enable direct peer-to-peer networking utilizing libp2p instead of the current central network hub - this will allow Golem’s network to become properly decentralized; finally, we are working towards including another payment driver based on Polygon (ex. Matic) Network.

Alpha 4 & Mainnet

You asked us why in Alpha 4 we use both testnet and mainnet, rather than simply not only mainnet (once it’s ready). This is because we need to have a reliable and suitable testing environment for developers.

Moreover, it’s important to keep in mind that Alpha 4 is “just” a release candidate to be tested in production, and as such it was not widely promoted.

Also, if you want an updated stats page for Yagna, here’s a snapshot of what it will look like:

For now, we are using it for development and debugging purposes, after we secure and audit it we can disclose it to the public, although we don’t have a clear timeline for this yet.

DeFi

As you know, we’re reaching out to DeFi like MakerDAO (psst, vote here)  and Aave. Becoming part of the DeFi ecosystem is a big step for us, and one of the magics unlocked by the migration to GLM. We started with MakerDAO and Aave, but we are reaching to most DEXes. On top of that, we’re also reviewing the legal implications to implementing liquidity provision programs for GLM holders (but for the time being we can’t promise anything).

Migration

As you know, we have started the migration towards GLM, an ERC20 token in order to unlock L2 and DeFi. While it sounds easy, there’s a catch as gas prices have been rather high lately. However, it’s important to remember that the migration has no end date so you can migrate whenever fees are lower or, if you’re not in a rush, you can you can broadcast (/send) a transaction (for example at 80 gwei Gas Price) and wait for it to go through in it’s own time.

If you have your GNT on Coinbase pro, they confirmed they will migrate at the end of March. You can have an updated list of exchanges that migrated here.

Community and Ecosystem

As the Golem community grows, there are questions about the ecosystem, our competitors and Golem’s unique positioning.

Our unique value proposition is that we’re permissionless, censorship resistant and we have no minimum token needed to get started. However, we would like to highlight that our real competitors are not other Web3.0 projects, but major Cloud Corporations that aren't able to provide the same censorship-resistance and borderlessness that blockchain enables.

In fact, we’re growing the ecosystem collaborating with companies and institutions with which we can deliver products together: in the past we we worked with Intel, UNC, ITL and Texas University on Project Graphene, right now we’re collaborating with zkSync, Polygon, MIT Solve, we’re working on a hackathon with other Ethereum projects to onboard developers from Web2.0.. The fil rouge between these collaborations is that they all have deliverables and result in tangible results.

Finally, we know, and you know, what Golem stands for. However, if you find yourself having difficulties explaining why you’re so excited about Web3.0 and Golem, MP has got your back: “from deplatforming to Google disruptions, Golem is a better option because it’s censorship resistant (no deplatforming) and decentralized (more resilient to downtime). (....) Maybe decentralization is not important for them, but making sure their app lives forever and is not deplatformed by big corp will do the trick.” Note: if that doesn’t do the trick, you can tell your friends to join our discord, and we’ll be happy to have late-night discussion on Web3.0.

That’s all for now, see you at the next AMA!