Golem Update - September 2020

Hello everyone! We wanted to keep you updated on what’s been happening at Golem.

New Golem

New Golem is being built out as we speak, with our first Alpha release shipped last month. Community feedback, as we reported, was quite positive and we are extremely optimistic. Now we’re heads down working on the second Alpha release, which will feature more functionality, allowing users to test out almost all features of the forthcoming MVP, on a contained testnet environment.

Releasing Alpha together with onboarding incentives and a survey for people to send us feedback worked really well, and we were able to implement this feedback for the upcoming Alpha 2. We will continue with what we call “feedback-driven” development so every New Golem release will come together with a battery of incentivized programs for developers (and users, in the future) so we can grow a lasting, returning user base.

Also, stay tuned for our last deep dive into the New Golem specifics in the coming weeks!

In the case that you missed it, we recently released the next part of our Unraveling Golem’s The Next Milestone series where we laid out the elements of New Golem’s reference architecture, illustrating how they interact to form a working ecosystem. We also covered our GitHub development in Digest #6, since then the team has continued development on SGX integration and Proof-of-Concept, along with supporting the capability of our level 1 of the Market spec (Simplistic Distributed Market) via decentralized implementation and Layer 2 zkSync integration.

Community

Tightly coupled with our releases, our Community Incentives Program has added Gitcoin as a platform for sourcing users last month - and this collaboration will continue. We’re planning to host a remote hackathon in a few months and in the meantime, will continue to post bounties.

We’ve also closed our Superrare contest with very positive feedback and will continue to tap into other communities to raise awareness on Golem.

We are also looking to hire another community manager to help us develop more categories for the CIP in the very near future.

Marketing + PR

Last month, we took time to reflect on community feedback spread across various Reddit threads. We understood we needed to ramp up quickly, and took a closer look at the way Golem works and what was needed to better position ourselves toward larger audiences, brand consolidation, and widespread company growth.

We are pleased to onboard Paragon, one of the industry-leading agencies to provide support with our public relations, marketing, and strategic communications efforts. Paragon is a specialist financial and technology communications agency with decades of top-level industry experience. As many of you know, we’ve been around for a while and because of our rich history in this space, we understand how crucial innovation is to the continuing development of our project. This is one of the reasons we are so excited to partner with Paragon as they help us demonstrate all the work we have been doing over the last few months, and will continue doing.

As we prepare for the MVP launch, we are looking forward to working closely with the Paragon team on the next steps for the Golem brand.

Migration

While we wait for the final legal check to be delivered, we’re working with wallet providers, coin aggregators, and other relevant parties to ensure the upcoming migration to ERC-20 of GNT runs smoothly. Our partners are crucial in ensuring truthful and trustworthy official information will be disseminated across channels.

While the migration date is still undefined, this process is of the utmost importance and highest priority. We will update you as soon as we have more information.

In the meantime, please stick to official sources only, and remember the migration process does not end. It is a smart-contract based process meaning users will always be able to migrate (the contract lives forever on the Ethereum blockchain) - and we are planning for the UI to be up for an extended period of time. No need to rush, or to constantly check for news, everyone will get the chance to migrate their tokens if they wish to.

Additional updates

As you may know, we host AMA approximately every two months. However, we have decided it’s in the best interest for our team and all of our users to continue in uninterrupted crunch mode until the second Alpha release is shipped. Therefore, our September AMA will be pushed a couple of weeks to allow our team to fully focus on migration, its coordination, the upcoming release, and more.

By “and more” we mean: continuing CHEM@Golem, revamping our strategy, and growing the team. Golem is again hiring, this time looking for a Solidity Engineer, a DevOps Engineer, a Community Manager, and a Developer Relations lead, to name a few roles. We will hopefully be hiring + onboarding new team members, throughout October and November. If you think you fit the profile or know someone, get in touch.

That’s it from us today!. We will be in touch very soon with development on the aforementioned fronts. As always, thank you all for the support, and please feel free to get in touch via our social media channels.

For more information about Golem, head over to our website.

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