On the 11th of November, 2016, the great Ethereum community funded Golem project, placing their trust in us to deliver technology to change the way the entire market for computation is organised. Even more impressively, it seems the community even shared our goal of building a better, more decentralised Internet on top of this already ambitious goal. Thus our focus is on delivering technology, and the sustainable business model that would surround it. This means our focus is not on many other things community sometimes expects us to do, and I’d like to explain what those things are, and why we ignore them.

Golem competitors and their ICOs/crowdfundings

Subject: [contact] (name of the project) takes over Golem

Date: Wed, 14 Jun 2017 09:36:52 +0200

From: (name)@gmail.com

To: contact@golem.network

Hey People,

Are you going to write something on the various crypto news channels or you are gonna let eat (name of the project) you alive.
Investers will be running through the door to them if you keep silent on those channels.
Writting text isn’t that hard else people like me will be dumping gnt and go for their ico tomorrow.

It is our policy that, wherever possible, we simply do not engage in discussions with our competitors, especially those which are in a pre-crowdfunding phase. We are not doing that, because we see it as a waste of our valuable time. Again, we have to focus on delivering this technology. Our self-proclaimed competitors are focused on showing how they are different and superior to Golem. This is an obvious strategy, as there is no need to fund a project which would be exactly the same or even inferior to Golem. The truth is however, that both Golem and others will struggle to manifest this vision, because it is hard. Have we solved all the problems? Not yet, we’re working on it. Have they? I do not think so and have not seen anything which would change my mind. And besides, if they have solved anything, they could just launch it; there would be no need for crowdfunding.

Make no mistake: we are researching in detail every project around that we think might be interesting and valuable for us. We are already forming partnerships with great teams to work together on decentralised technologies. I believe there is always scope to cooperate, if the other party (even your competitor!) acts reasonable. I also believe that most of the teams working on similar technologies are legitimate, and some may eventually do better than Golem (of course I believe we are the best, but I am biased). I also think that sometimes, some of the project fail to communicate responsibly what their technology is, and even what Golem is — either because they have not researched the technology, or because they wish to create hype and FUD around some ICO. But, if that is often the case, why do we not engage in the discussion?

Communication to speculators does not matter

We do not do that because communication to traders and speculators is not that important to the actual development and adoption of our core technology. All the communication around ICOs and prices is communication to people interested in ICOs and prices. This group is not relevant for the adoption of projects like Golem. We either go mainstream, which is to say, we become successful at minimum in some interesting sub-communities outside of the blockchain space, or we die. And on the contrary, entering into irrelevant discussions on nonsensical statements (or true statements we have commented 10 times already) is simply a waste of our time. At this stage of the project, we owe ourselves and our community two things: regular information about our progress, and a business development and communications strategy for the broader world.

Price discussions are harmful

What I said above is even more true for the discussions around the price of GNT. A week ago I was asked to comment at a conference on prices. If you think about that, there is no way I can give a good answer. Regardless of what I say, it will be be misinterpreted by some, and not understood by others. It will result in a mess, and then an even larger mess when I will try to explain what I mean, which will itself be misinterpreted and misunderstood. I will waste a lot of time, the project will lose credibility, and that all for no gain whatsoever. About entering discussions on the ICOs and crowdfunding events of our competitors, we see it as more or less the same.

This is all about technology

What we are doing here is creating cutting-edge technology, and then pushing it to mainstream, practical use, as fast and hard as we can. Honestly I believe that we can do that — I know that this is what we are going to do. Thus, discussing how to achieve that is generally perceived by us as a betteruse of our time, certainly better than discussing other teams’ blog posts. And if this latter discussion is a process purely driven by ICO logic, then this is really not useful.

At the same time, discussing and sharing ideas, and building on the shoulders of others is how this space should work as a whole. This needs no hate/FUD about competitors, but rather mature discussion with others about technology, and clear-minded cooperation. At the moment, 5 engineers from the core Golem team are at the Swarm Summit in Berlin, busy exchanging ideas with other top developers in the Ethereum space. In my humble opinion, this is how we should discuss our decentralised future — and I encourage everyone, including our competitors, to do so.