Golem GitHub Digest #7: Decentralization of the New Golem marketplace

What’s in store for this Digest?

New month, new exciting tech to share! Last week, we released the Golem Update - September 2020 covering some exciting information of what we’ve been up to and what we’re looking forward to with the upcoming Alpha 2 release. In this new edition of the Github Digest, we’ll primarily be focusing on what our decentralized implementation of the marketplace will be and its progress on a technical level. We’ll also be diving into some of the interesting releases from the Yagna related repository, i.e. development relevant to New Golem.

Also before we dive in, don’t forget that our Community Incentives Program (CIP) is ongoing and we want to reward more community members, and keep growing it! There are many ways to participate + get rewarded, such as helping other users, sharing relevant content that you feel might interest the community, and even having fun with memes.

We’ll announce the September CIP winners shortly.

So, what’s in the Golem GitHub?

One very important aspect of Golem is the ability for nodes on the Golem network to interact in a peer-to-peer (P2P) manner. In the first Alpha reveal released a bit more than a month ago, some aspects of the network are P2P while others are not.

One of the best and most notable things about how New Golem is being built is that it’s very modular, meaning that we can easily swap in and out various components in order to upgrade them, or expand functionalities in a much easier way than in Clay.

Till now, the marketplace within New Golem has been centralized, meaning that in the first alpha the nodes are reliant on us for their marketplace specific communication. Naturally, this isn’t a desirable feature for a decentralized network and was only a temporary solution to allow the community to begin playing with the Alpha in a timely manner.

But now, it’s time to decentralize this core component.

With the help of the modular aspect of New Golem, we’re going to be swapping out the centralized marketplace module in favour of level 1 of the Market spec (Simplistic Distributed Market) decentralized implementation which our marketplace team has been progressing towards almost since the inception of New Golem. The level 1 Market API capability level consists of the decentralized discovery phase, negotiation and agreement phase.

You can see the first glimpse at Yagna with Decentralized Marketplace in a recent pre-release in the Yagna GitHub and preparations for a full release of the Alpha2 reveal of New Golem are in the draft stage. We can expect this release to be tested prior to being announced as the official release of the Alpha 2 reveal so remember to keep your hats on for an announcement on our blog, even if you see the release go out on GitHub!

In other GitHub progress, the Yagna Runtime VM (ya-runtime-vm repository) had its first minor release (v1.1) since its proof-of-concept (PoC). Yagna Runtime VM provides a lightweight docker-like execution environment for tasks and is part of the broader topic of ya-runtime.

The development team also merged and updated the Command Line Interface (CLI) which will be discussed more in the upcoming release and be included in the handbook.

On the payments side of things, in the previous GitHub Digest (#6) we mentioned that the first very basic functionality (a simple PoC) was created for Layer 2 payments. The subteam focused on that development continued with the first working transfer, adjusted for use in the Yagna payment driver (shown here).

Digest wrap-up!

This GitHub Digest was focused a lot on the peer-to-peer aspect of Golem, progressing into New Golem. We’re very enthusiastic about our new creation of Golem soon moving from a centralized to decentralized marketplace. There are multiple levels of our decentralized marketplace with exciting features to come so expect more coming in the future!

If the evolution of P2P networks such as Golem excites you as much as it excites us then you should definitely check out this recently published panel on that exact topic! Participants include María Paula Fernández (Advisor to the Board of Directors at Golem), Henri Pihkala (Streamr CEO), Fatemeh Shirazi (Web3 Foundation Research Team Lead), Sebastian Bürgel (HOPR project founder), and Karissa McKelvey (Simply Secure researcher).

To get involved in the CIP join our Discord chat, get involved on Reddit, tag us in interesting conversations on Twitter, or even throw some memes Telegram. See you in the next GitHub Digest!