Golem Crowdfunding Whitepaper, Draft Release

Today we are pleased to announce the draft release of the Golem crowdfunding whitepaper, available to download here.

To those anticipating our position, yes we will have a cap for this crowdfunding — $10M USD — and we are all too aware of our responsibility to deliver value to the community, whether we reach it or not. Golem lives on the technological frontier, with not only vast R&D ahead of us, but unknown unknowns as well. In other words, we do not yet know all the risks, but we feel that this is a reasonable cap, given the state of the project, the plan ahead, and the current situation within the Ethereum community. We also echo Vitalik’s call to not create smart contracts holding more than $10M, not just on purely technological grounds (security), but also because of wider community considerations: We ourselves have no wish to take in anything more than we believe we can put to use, and we certainly don’t wish to exhaust the pool of ETH available to other important projects.

The good news is that Golem has already reached an advanced proof-of-concept stage, and we believe that we have sufficiently proven that it can be taken much further. Indeed, our vision is much broader than our PoC may suggest: “Airbnb for computers” is an accurate description, but it is also oversimplified. Golem will change how the Internet is organized by introducing a nearly-complete information market for computing power, combined with a market within which developers can monetize their code.

Golem is possible thanks to bleeding-edge technology, but its true potential derives from the impact it will have on economic processes running beneath the surface. Golem’s token, GNT, has a simple design, yet it is also integrated in an efficient and beneficial way by playing an essential role in both Golem’s economics, and its security.

We are really looking forward to your feedback on our crowdfunding whitepaper.

And for those who wait for the date: we are working hard on the crowdfunding contract code. Once it is complete, and audited, we will present it for the community to review, and propose a date. This will happen soon, in perhaps as little as 2–3 weeks.