New Golem: Alpha II reveal - we're ready for you to come build with us!

Hi everyone, the latest version (v0.4.0) of our New Golem Alpha is here!

Once the dust settled after our first Alpha reveal, and we had a chance to analyze all the feedback and experience we've gathered, we’ve been heads down implementing both those lessons learned and our original plan for the next step towards the new Golem.

As communicated in our July AMA session, we had established that we would take the road to MVP of New Golem in minor milestones. Today we’re excited to release the next such milestone, the Alpha 2!

On this occasion, we'd like to wholeheartedly thank everybody who took part in our previous alpha reveal - it was massively useful in our preparations for this one. And similarly to the first alpha, it remains our most vital goal in this release to gather as much early feedback from developers and the rest of our community as possible so that we can improve our product and align it with our users' actual needs and expectations.

All right, so what is that shiny new thing then?

Distributed Marketplace

Firstly, a new and spicy decentralized Marketplace. The marketplace implementation in the first alpha reveal was centralized - in other words, it relied on a single instance of the database and the matching engine that all the network nodes connected to. Now, that functionality has been implemented in the form of a distributed database and a mechanism able to efficiently exchange its fragments. As a result, a daemon on each node can act as its own marketplace, matching the offers from the network with its own demands and vice-versa. It's an important landmark on our way to truly decentralized, peer-to-peer network.

Improved OS support

With the previous alpha, we consciously limited ourselves to the unix-like platforms so that we could focus on delivering the functionality first. In this release, we've had a chance to test the software on a wider range of platforms and hence, the new support list looks like:

• Ubuntu 18.04 and 20.04
• macOS X 10.14+
• Windows 8.1 and 10

Having said that, we're pretty certain yagna itself and the APIs will work correctly on other platforms - especially other Linux flavors - if someone is sufficiently inclined to adapt our instructions accordingly.

Revamped Python API

In the previous alpha, we have shown you what had then been a very early version of yapapi - our high-level Python API. Now we had a chance to spend some time on bugfixing and other improvements. Your experience with the API should now be smoother, with clearer messaging and comprehensive reference which you can use to develop your own apps.

Early alpha of the JS/TS API

To reach out to a wider audience within the developer community, a JavaScript/TypeScript counterpart to our Python API - the yajsapi has also been released.

It's not yet as streamlined as the Python one and much more on par with the Python API from the first reveal. Still, if you're a JavaScript developer, you might just as well have a stab at using it to run your own payload on Golem.

Extended requestor tutorials

Furthermore, to accompany our Python API, along with its improved docs, we've prepared some detailed tutorials that will help you get up to speed with Golem application development. Apart from the pieces that you might already know - namely the updated quick primer, and introductions to creating your Golem-runnable VM images and requestor agent development, we created a detailed description of the process an aspiring Golem application author would take in order to take his computational problem from an idea to a successful Golem implementation.

So here it is: a detailed "Create your own Golem application" tutorial. It's important to mention here also that this new, extended tutorial is based on another example application that we have built on Golem. It utilizes "Hashcat" - a password recovery tool - to show you one more successful use case built for Golem using our Python API.

Build with Golem!

As you might have been able to notice, our Alpha II happens to be quite cool. We've taken the SDK, albeit still alpha, to the level where we're comfortable recommending it to the outside world as the foundation to build your own applications.

To this end, and because it is our aim to bootstrap the network as much as possible, we've designed four incentivized challenges.

There are 17 slots open for these challenges. If none of these are what you're looking for but you still want to build atop of Golem, we will be happy to discuss with you. Just drop us an email to developers@golem.network and we'll be scheduling an interview and assessing your particular case.

Now, to the bounties :

Light challenges (from 3h to 8h)

• Compile VIM* on single Golem Node (n=1) [3h] - Gitcoin Link
• Process and visualise interesting compuations using Matplotlib on multiple Golem nodes (n=4) [8h] - Gitcoin Link
• Run John the Ripper on multiple Golem nodes with multiple strategies [8h] - Gitcoin Link

Medium challenge (20h)

• Transcoding web application (20h) - Gitcoin Link

There's over 10.000 USDC in rewards for these bounties - we're really looking forward to it!

Coming up, we will also have a Provider release, and even if it's testnet, we will have GNT rewards for the extra helpful testers!

Let's go!

Curious about the overall plan? Check our The Next Milestone guides Part I, II and III.

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

Got feedback on this blogpost? send us an email or join our Discord!

Want to start a discussion about it? Reddit or our new Discourse are the best places for it! Follow us on Twitter to get the latest announcements & progress updates.