Golem in 2022. Lots to do!

At the beginning of this month we released the summary of Golem’s achievements and notable events in 2021. During that year there was a large focus on making Yagna ready as a potential backend for applications and having high-level APIs (primarily Yapapi) for developers to work with.

Now it’s time for 2022! For this year we aim to give more power to the developers in their DApp creation. In addition, Thorg has plans to grow his features. In this blog we will cover many of our plans for this year.

Thorg

Thorg began as a small and stubby dwarf coming into the decentralized space. For 2022 he’s looking to grow to being less small but even more stubby, to be able to fit in all the new features in his belly.

The new features for Thorg planned for 2022 include: CPU tasks, gamification, more mining engines, affiliation programme, income & usage dashboard in the Thorg UI, extended customization, and experimental features (e.g. generic GPU task). Look out for updates on Thorg’s Twitter!

Golem as a DApp Stack

People willing to buy services running on Golem value decentralization as a concept, for this reason, we would like to create platform for developers of DApps as our potential target group.

Our goal is to create a convenient environment for DApps with extensive tutorials showing how to leverage the Golem platform. We aim to make these tutorials a smooth and easier way for developers to deploy their applications compared to typical cloud platforms.

For 2021 we’re aware that we’re not there yet, however, we have established low-level advantages and building blocks to give an advantage over centralized platforms. Such as there being no need for a registered account or formal agreement, payments are being settled continuously in contrast to the usual monthly invoicing for monthly services.

We will be slipping this path to Golem as a DApp Stack into two steps:

Part 1 - Late June / July 2022
Create SDK for writing simple web applications. We aim to make this to be able to be deployed without the requestor node constantly running in the background.

Imagine visiting a website made specifically for deploying such apps, Yaml deployment descriptor and paying with MetaMask for hosting and deployment, from that point, the application is being run on the Golem Network. Part 1 we will treat as proof-of-concept (PoC) and is slated to be ready around late June / July 2022.

Part 2 - November 2022
The more complicated sections following the PoC will be in the 2nd half of the year. In contrast to Part 1, this will include the ability to create applications integrated with the blockchain. The ServiceAPI SDK will need to be more aligned to that of Web3.

Part 2 will be a bit more interactive with the community where we hope to organize a workshop with DApp creators to get involved in formulating the smoothest experience and onboarding flow. This will involve multiple iterations, and in the end, we’re aiming to have sample DApps, for example:

• Simple decentralized exchange (DEX)
• Lending application
• Oracles
• Gasless forwarder

Challenges

We’re aware of many challenges that we will face, and are currently facing (challenges are a good thing!). We need to create a reputation system both for the benefit of requestors and providers.

1. For the requestors, this would help them to choose the best performing providers for their needs. For the provider, it will make it easier for them to decide which requestors they would like to offer their computational services on the marketplace.
2. We need incoming and outgoing network access (such as access to Geth and/or IPFS nodes) to allow the DApps to be able to flourish. This requires us to enable access from the internet to DApps, with the integration of easy-to-remember names (e.g. DNS or ENS). This will probably also require some sort of firewall or packet filter to help guarantee safety for our providers, at the same time as giving access to the DApp running in containers.
3. Payment architecture so that an application can run without an active requestor. We like to refer to this as “Unstoppable services”.
4. Another of our challenges will be to create persistent storage in the form of a Persistence API. So that we can make the network resistant to loss of data on individual provider nodes or incorrect operations. We’re investigating NoSQL databases or doing some sort of side-chain that can help nodes with synchronization.

Unstoppable Golem Services

Currently, services on Golem (introduced in Beta II) will stop when the requestor stops their Yagna daemon or Golem reaches the 10 hour limit for a task, but we want to go beyond that in 2022. What this would be likely to look like would be with the use of a smart contract, either on Ethereum or potentially Polygon, to create a payment stream for the service to continue to run on the provider. This could require a multi-sig contract where providers can vote on particular actions.

To create this, we’re considering a model where a guild of many providers works together to deliver services that are both safe and reliable. The providers of a guild will form a consensus mechanism where they check each other's health, verify actions, and vote on the following: including or excluding new providers to the guild, and taking on new tasks. The decision resolving would be on-chain.

The main goal of the guild would be that the service runs, works smoothly, and is resilient to failures on singular provider nodes, in contrast to the current version of Golem which has no resilience to this yet!

Token Visibility

We want a smooth experience with the GLM token. For this, in 2022 we look to focus on visibility on various fronts:

• Oracles for GLM
• Support for GLM on different platforms (e.g. Compound)
• Applications for playing with GLM
• Staking mechanisms (which would likely require a new type of token in the Golem ecosystem)
• More chain integration

Wanting to learn more and keep closer up to date?

This has been a high-level overview of what we’re planning for Yagna, Thorg and the GLM token for the year of 2022. There are some items outside of these main topics that we will give more light to when they’ve solidified.

For those interested in taking a closer look into Golem, the Golem GitHub is a great resource; for example, you can follow the ”.Core” projects page to see what the Golem core developers are getting into. In addition, we’ve started working around Golem Amendment Proposal (GAPs), which we plan to cover more in a future blog.

Thank you for taking the time to read this blog! Please check out the links below for our socials and keeping up to date with Golem.
Website: https://golem.network/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/golemproject
Discord Chat: https://chat.golem.network/
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Github: https://github.com/golemfactory
Handbook: https://handbook.golem.network/