Meet the Golem Project

My computer is hardly a high-end one: it is a three-year old laptop with one of the USB ports broken and a shattered bottom-left corner of the screen. For me, though, it is still more than powerful enough most times I use it. In fact, it exceeds my need by a few-fold factor. When I am typing this, the CPU usage remains at a level between 0 and 4% and the memory usage is stable at 32%. If I keep typing, this is unlikely to change, while both disk and network usage will remain close to 0%. When I open a spreadsheet, the CPU usage peaks for a few moments at 35% and then goes back to 2% and the memory is now at 33%. And although I use my laptop a lot, it is idle most of the time.

Enough about numbers. The point is that usually you would do just fine with a quarter of your computer’s resources, or even less, if you have a modern computer which you use for news, films, social media, e-mail or simple office tasks. In fact, if you are not a CGI artist, a crypto miner, a software developer or anyone else from the flock of nerds always hungry for more powerful CPUs and GPUs, then the way you use your computer is just a waste of its potential. It is inefficient both economically and environmentally.

This is basically the starting point for us and our idea for changing the way the computing world is organised. We want to use the existing infrastructure to take over the job currently done by mainframes, computing farms and supercomputers. We want to use your computer to do the job.

Using existing computers to do the hard job seems a very obvious idea and it is partly happening: folding@home or Boinc already have a computing potential comparable to that of the fastest supercomputers. So what is really new about Golem? Well, a lot.

First of all, we are going to add a market for computing resources to the equation. Trading will be fast, automatic and secure. Ethereum and ethers will be used as a basis for transactions and as the contracting system. In contrast to existing systems, there will not only be a reward provided to users for contributing to the network, but also anyone interested will be able to pay for using its potential. This is going to be a direct deal between owners of idle machines and users seeking additional resources to compute their tasks.

Secondly, the Golem Network will be much more than a solution to demanding computing tasks in business and science. Cases with high demand for CPU/GPU power like CGI or CAD rendering, crypto mining and dozens of statistical, engineering or scientific applications are what we decided to start with. However, later we are going to transform the Golem Network into an infrastructure for decentralised internet and DApps. And that will truly change the way Internet is organised.

Finally, the design of the Golem Network will be fully decentralised and that is why we use cryptocurrency for transactions. We will be responsible for design, upkeep, development etc., but the Golem Network will be fully autonomous, exactly as other p2p networks are. This is much more important than it seems because infrastructure that could be arbitrarily turned off by someone is no good for the users. That is why we decided to make Golem Project software open source. Very soon, you are going to see more of what we have done so far.

We are aware that developing Golem will be extremely challenging but the progress we have made so far is really promising. We will be disclosing more in the weeks ahead about our plans for both the near future and the years to come. We are also going to discuss the crucial challenges and how we are dealing with them. Stay tuned and feel free to ask us about anything at all!