Why no fee?

When the original concept for Golem was put forward, it included a 5% fee, subtracted from every transaction in the Golem network. At the time, this was considered a reasonable way to finance the project and ensure its long-term sustainability. Having researched this solution, we came to conclusion that it would work well in a DAO-like framework, which was the original plan… We had wanted to submit Golem as a proposal to The DAO, after all.

So, upon The DAO’s tragic collapse, we “ported” this idea to a regular crowdfunding setup without a second thought. Thus we continued to link tokens to the fee revenues of the Golem network. However, with due consideration of the feedback received, we’ve come to a new conclusion. We now believe that having a fee without all the requirements of governance, voting, and cash flow automation (more or less required by DAO-like solutions), would be not sustainable long-term. Indeed, we believe that we would be creating a kind of permanent parasite on the Golem network, collecting fees ad infinitum and giving very little in return apart from a burst of initial development. Additionally, as the fee revenue would never be used for further development and expansion, this would inevitably lead to an emergence of a fee-free fork at some point. We can — and should — do better than that.

We decided instead to create a token which will have real function, integrating both the network and the community, while giving long-term sustainability to the project:

1. Both payments from requestors to providers for resource usage, and remuneration for software developers, will be conducted exclusively in GNT.
2. GNT will be necessary for other interactions with Golem, such as the submission of deposits by providers and software developers, or participation in the process of software validation and certification (that is, once the Application Registry and Transaction Framework are implemented; see whitepaper for details).
3. GNT now has a migration function included. This will be much needed, because we are not able to to implement all the features we might require now. For example we may wish to support solutions such as state channels, transaction batching, or other interesting solutions developed on Ethereum. Golem and its token will thus be able to evolve and adapt to changing circumstances

We believe this arrangement aligns incentives, reduces confusion, and is generally much better for Golem, its users, and those who decide to support usduring our crowdfunding phase.

As always, questions, comments, and concerns should be directed to our Slack. Thanks for your time.