Summary of the Golem AMA May 2020

Welcome to the summary of the bi-monthly Reddit AMA. We are really pleased to see the enthusiastic and growing community participation in the May AMA. The primary focus of questions revolved around the ERC20 migration of GNT, The Next Milestone, new team members coupled with the reorganization of current subteams, attracting developers to the The Next Milestone, and what’s in store beyond. These are the sections we will divide the summary into.

This summary will focus mostly on the technical news concerning the Golem software and roadmap, for the full version that includes other topics, you can head directly over to the Reddit thread.

We’ve included a TL;DR at the end of this post.

ERC20 Migration, DeFi and tokenomics

A significant part of this topic has also been covered in the ERC20 Migration section of the ReadyLayerOne synopsis blog. In the AMA we dived more into it from our perspective and what to expect:

Our migration is planned and a significant portion of the work towards starting the process has already begun, however, we point out that it is NOT active nor has a starting date at this current time. Once migration is possible, you will be able to migrate via an online app that we are building and will be hosting ourselves. GNT holders will find out more about this directly from our official communication channels. We are also working on providing video and written tutorials, communications channels, and everything you will need. The migration app’s life will extend through a decent amount of time, allowing everyone to be able to migrate easily.

As for responses on the topic of DeFi, we covered that we would like to see DeFi related integrations with Golem pop up. We’re actively looking for DeFi projects where off-chain computation is needed. If the computation performance profile is in alignment with the Golem Network, we want to serve it. Moreover, a significant part of our future migration is motivated by DeFi.

There was a question on Medium-of-Exchange (MoE) and at the moment GNT is simply MoE. We’d like to highlight that we do research and try to stay open-minded regarding new use cases, new platforms, reputation systems, governance solutions, verification methods, anti Sybils, tokenomics, etc. So nothing is written in stone and usage of GNT can be revisioned, which leads us to the following topic of our AMA summary, The Next Milestone.

The Next Milestone (TNM)

We’ve covered the general topic of TNM previously, Kuba (who recently participated in Cryptocurrency Weekly podcast, [in Polish]) from the Golem team covers the purpose of our direction, that “we believe that there is a need for developer tools that would be easy to use, have better UX than clouds and serverless and allow them to write resource-heavy applications that would benefit from values like censorship resistance, geographical distribution and permissionlessness.”

The new Golem protocol is a detour to suit these developer-centric needs, and it was decided over a year ago, that by dropping our assumptions on the prosumer market and how verification should be performed, a brand new architecture was required.

For the long-term benefit of the code and it’s maintenance, this new architecture has been coded in Rust. An answer that offers too much detailed perspective for this summary to give it justice was on our choice to build the next iteration in Rust instead of continuing with Python, you can find that answer in the AMA by one of our developers, Tworec, here.

To find out more, please see our Unraveling Golem’s The Next Milestone, Part I blogpost. There were a few questions on building interest in the The Next Milestone and budgeting, which we can combine to the following two sections of this summary.

Team

We’ve had a few new team members this year, the most recent of which you can find introductions for in the AMA, here. We also went into how we’re finding it at Golem up until this point.

Something which may not be as immediately obvious from the outside is that the current team members are also in the process of being reorganized into small, cross-functional, autonomous teams with a single focus and clearly defined objectives. The teams would be: SDK, ExeUnits, Decentralised Marketplace, Payments (and a bit later p2p network, provider client). The purpose of the reorganization and new team members is to suit the needs of what we foresee for The Next Milestone.

Mentioned also in the AMA for budgeting, we don’t expect these changes to impact our budgeting too drastically compared to the path we would have taken otherwise.

Attracting developers to The Next Milestone

We have decided to work on The Next Milestone with a “developer-first” approach. Meaning we intent to release, promote awareness, get feedback from developers, and improve to suit their needs. Two of our new team members (Lee, DevRel, and Marta, UX researcher) will play a key role in this feedback loop.

In the AMA, we covered that until gWASM we didn’t have anything to offer to developers. With the direction we’re taking, and particularly once we’ve built our MVP, we will focus on offering as much as we can to assist Web3 developers to build on Golem. This includes internal plans of participating and hosting hackathons.

Use-cases will be determined by developers, and if a company wants to build something that needs a lot of computing power, it will be easy for their tech team to leverage Golem without onboarding hiccups. This leads us onto the topic of an interesting question on the AMA, “after The Next Milestone is accomplished and running well, what are the technical goals of Factory?”

After TNM

Viggith dives into the long answer of this and how The Next Milestone is the result of years of learning experiences, planning, and many months of building. However, since what we’re building will become such a flexible platform to build on top of, it makes it quite difficult for us to predict what direction the applications built by developers will cause us to take.

This is in contrast to the current Golem, where we restricted it to us deciding on and building the use-cases. This gave us the luxury of being able to plan much further ahead and know exactly what the future would look like one or two years down the road.

Conclusion

Many of the topics covered in this AMA and its summary wrap together, such as the new team members and reorganization of current team members to suit the needs of The Next Milestone and for them to be flexible to suit future needs that are hard to predict due to the, synergizing with the flexibility of what the platform will become. In the long-term, we’re confident that the steps we’re taking (and are going to take) surrounding The Next Milestone will bring the best outcome for the Golem project and community.

Thank you for reading this AMA summary and to all those in the community who joined in to ask us questions. As mentioned in the introduction, we were overwhelmed with excitement for all the interest in Golem’s past and upcoming progress.

TL;DR

Over the past 18+ months, we’ve used our experiences to plan, build, reorganizing our teams internally (ongoing), and hired new team members to suit the needs of The Next Milestone. Our token migration is being built but NOT yet live. You will be able to find more details and updates as they’re released in official channels (listed above).

Website: http://golem.network/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/golemproject
Chat http://chat.golem.network/
Blog: https://blog.golemproject.net/
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/GolemProject/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/golemproject/
Youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCl3fxgrSML2sL3UYZrynbMg
Github: https://github.com/golemfactory
Documentation: https://docs.golem.network/