AMA October 2020 Summary

Last week we hosted our October AMA and here you can find a summary of what we discussed. We’ve split the summary into the most popular topics of the day: migration, product development, GTM, governance, strategy, etc etc. So let’s dive right in.

Migration and future roadmap

As we announced, we’ll migrate GNT to an ERC-20 token: Layer 2 is coming in December alongside the Alpha III which will feature azkSync payment driver by default. Our idea is, if everything goes smoothly with the migration, to eventually enable mainnet for providers first to test in the format of an incentivized testnet, however this is yet not set in stone.

Since the migration is the key that unlocks New Golem, we have a few items on the agenda for future developments, including (in no particular order): Mainnet readiness, Secure Execution Environments, Rust API, a fully decentralised networking module, more payments drivers, execution environments with support for node communication, a web browser support for developers etc.

A lot of our effort goes into building the best experience for developers to let them easily build trustless multi-agent applications. In order to know whether we’re in the right path or if we need to adjust the product, we have been conducting several interviews with developers about what they need, and what they use Golem for. This is why our Gitcoin bounty applicants and other devs building atop of Golem are so important and the requestor onboarding, their building and the feedback process are incentivized.

In fact, looking ahead the New Golem might not only include computational capacity, but it will be a more comprehensive platformthat includes features like secure computation, i.e. Graphene/SGX execution environments (that might come handy for secret voting, date matching etc), network bandwidth in solutions like decentralized VPN, network monitors, mesh networks, geographical diversity needs (nodes in different continents), disk space, file sharing, different hardware configuration for broader and deep testing etc etc (full list here).

GTM (Go-to-Market) and Marketing

In order to get developers to build on top of the New Golem we launched another round of bounties where we had allocated 10k USD across 17 slots. For the upcoming Alpha III, we want to host an online hackathon via Gitcoin.. We expect to allocate around 40k USD more by the end of the year, and have a fourth bounties round in February. In 2021 we’ll have more bounties to gather feedback around the MVP and more grants programs but for this, we will need to look at the stats and the progress, so in March 2021 we’ll be reassess our strategy and allocating capital once again.

In terms of marketing, in the long term we aim at embracing both our long relationship with Ethereum and looking beyond this ecosystem, towards positioning Golem Network as a leader in the cloud industry. To do so, our short term goal is to elevate the thought leadership profiles of Golem Network’s executive team, while in the medium-term we are looking to promote the New Golem and position the project as the leading solution for censorship resistance, computation and democratized access to innovation.

Governance

As Viggith mentioned, Golem democratizes access to innovation by giving everyone access to a truly open hardware resource sharing platform, and also the possibility of earning a passive income. This is because Golem’s protocol allows almost every class of hardware to join the network, and it leaves it up to requestors and providers to choose their own setups, without imposing any restrictions. This means, in other words, lowering the barriers to entry, both in terms of hardware and in terms of knowledge.

Moreover, there is no on-chain governance scheme: anyone can access and plug their machines, we want to keep the experience as frictionless as possible.

Conclusion

So many things happened recently, it is difficult to keep track. Yet, the best is yet to come, so buckle up because, like we said, our future is just around the corner and we could not make it without the support of such an engaged community.

Curious about the overall plan? Check our The Next Milestone guides Part I, II and III.

For more information about Golem, head over to our website. For resources on New Golem, see the brand new Awesome Golem.

Got feedback on this blogpost? Send us an email or join our Discord! Want to start a discussion about it? Reddit or our new Discourse are the best places for it! Follow us on Twitter to get the latest announcements & progress updates. To watch some videos about Golem, see the Golem Project Youtube channel.