People of Golem: meet team R&D
Golem has made a big investment (time and resources) towards a very active R&D team - staying curious, at the forefront experimentation and pushing innovation forward are paramount for our company.
gWASM, Pay as you Use (or Pay as you GOlem - as the community baptized it), verification, the FHE sample we used for Devcon5’s workshop, the anti-sybil mechanism we presented a few months ago… what do they all have in common? They are conceived by our very curious and professional R&D team!
In this new instalment of our blogposts where we feature each team, their milestones, duties and deliverables, we’re introducing them. Golem has made a big investment (time and resources) towards a very active R&D team - staying curious, at the forefront experimentation and pushing innovation forward are paramount for our company.
The R&D team is formed by Marcin Benke (research/dev, PhD), Jakub Konka (research/dev, PhD), Wiktor Nowakowski (biz dev, almost PhD), Marcin Mielniczuk (research/dev, student), Łukasz Gleń (research, PhD). In the next few paragraphs, Łukasz will take you through everything about the R&D team.
Core duties and team ethos
“Our core duty is to research whether certain technologies or solutions are suitable for Golem and are feasible to integrate. We also investigate use cases for Golem. On the biz dev level, we are in charge of assessing each possible use-case on a product level and technical level.
The more in-depth, domain, long-lasting research is also our responsibility. This includes working on marketplaces, distributed economies, anti-Sybil solutions, identities etc. In this realm, we also study the feasibility of using Golem/GU for molecular computations or machine learning. Last but not least, we work on future functionalities as licenses or thee application registry.”
The Golem R&D team is product-oriented which makes a little bit different than the usual teams on this field. Their goal is to deliver certain novel products and launch them into mainnet, like gWASM. This team stands out as in addition, their approach to the deliverables is also grounded in business analysis and requirements’ point of view.
“The teams we collaborate with the most are Brass and Unlimited. Recently, we joined forces with the Brass team in order to deliver gWASM on mainnet before Devcon5. We also cooperate with Golem Unlimited as we recognize GU as an interesting environment for running scientific simulations and MPI computations. Unlimited allows us to study the feasibility of using LAN networks for more science-oriented computations. Within our responsibilities are also the promotion and communications of gWASM, and testing hypothesis on gWASM productivisation. Now that R&D and Brass have delivered gWASM on mainnet, R&D will be focused on providing a usage marketplace and improving performance. In addition, we started contributing to the Wasmtime project - as our goal is to replace our sandbox, based on SpiderMonkey, with this new runtime.”
Beyond gWASM - the Golem R&D goals and verticals
“Another core task for our team is to investigate decentralized marketplaces. This includes transactions frameworks, anti-Sybil defence, identity, distributed reputations etc. The goal is to ensure the effectiveness, fairness and stability of distributed economies like the Golem Network. The first steps towards this is introducing the usage marketplace for gWASM.
In addition, one big goal for us is to investigate whether it is feasible to perform scientific computations and simulations in a LAN network. Usually, such computations requires HPC clusters. So the question is which computations and under what conditions can be effectively run in LAN networks, and of course, how Golem can support such use-cases.
Finally, Golem is very interesting use case for FHE and snarks. We created PoC for FHE on gWASM and we keep investigating what implementations of FHE and snarks are feasible to run on gWASM or on Golem as an app. In the end we have to mention application registry and licenses.
R&D is the place where theoretical research meets practical development. Using math, studying models, learning about technologies, building prototypes, and how it is actually implemented in the “real world” is a core focus. For Golem’s R&D team, business and product value while keeping the “launching to mainnet” perspective for their activities is paramount.
We hope you enjoyed this new instalment - as always, watch this space, R&D and the rest of the People of Golem are in constant motion and there’s always something new to tell our community!
More info about Golem in our website.