Many of you here on Steemit are invested in crypto or at least looking to invest in crypto. You have all heard of the main stream cryptos Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, EOS, Cardano, Ripple, etc. But if you want to look into other cryptos with large potential earning power, look into Golem (GNT). Golem has been referred to simply as the “Airbnb for computers.”
What is Golem?
Golem is an ERC-20 token on the Ethereum blockchain and arguably the most successful Ethereum project and if not of the best cryptos period, from a fundamental perspective. Golem is a worldwide, decentralized P2P supercomputer that combines the computing power of every machine on its network. Essentially users on the Golem ecosystem can lend out their computer’s spare CPU power to other users who have demand for their CPU power. This processing power can help compute tasks that the requestor does not have on their PC and could help save them potentially thousands of dollars. The requestor wouldn’t have to go buy additional computer equipment or pay the hefty fees of Amazon web services.
”Any user ranging from a single PC owner to a large data center can share resources through Golem and get paid in GNT (Golem Network Tokens) by requestors.”
By renting your CPU power over the network you collect the currency GNT(Golem), currently at about $.59 USD or a market cap of $491 million USD.
What Golem is Capable Of Doing
• Scientific research, from DNA research to finding new biofuels to searching for alien life to predicting & mitigating the effects of climate change to analyzing experimental results from the Large Hadron Collider. And that’s just off the top of my head.
• Graphics rendering, so that everything from uber realistic virtual reality video games & movies to architectural & designer renderings can be done uber fast and cheap.
• Artificial intelligence & machine learning, so that everything from training a game AI to play video games really well to teaching self driving cars to creating a smarter-than-humans artificial intelligence being can be done faster.
• Data analysis, from predicting future results on the stock market to analyzing written text for emotional analysis to crunching the data on traffic accidents.
• Cryptocurrency mining, to create efficient & decentralized mining pools to serve as the backbone of cryptocurrencies.
Big Money Use Cases
Another use case to consider is large movie production companies with large multi-million budgets. Consider, Pixar, a production company that spends several millions of dollars on CGI rendering to make its films.
An excerpt from the creation of the movie “Monsters University” in 2013: “inside the building is a data center full of humming servers — double the size that the company used in the past — that would be considered one of the top 25 supercomputers in the world. The 2,000 computers have more than 24,000 cores. The data center is like the beating heart behind the movie’s technology. Even with all of that computing might, it still takes 29 hours to render a single frame of Monsters University, according to supervising technical director Sanjay Bakshi. Rendering means that the computers build the 3D world in its full colors as the scene is meant to be viewed in a theater. The machines create the frame and it is then captured as one of thousands of frames in the movie. When you watch the movie, you see anywhere from 24 frames to 60 frames per second. All told, it has taken more than 100 million CPU hours to render the film in its final form. If you used one CPU to do the job, it would have taken about 10,000 years to finish. With all of those CPUs that Pixar did have, it took a couple of years to render.”
Other Rumors
Bayer AG is a German multinational, pharmaceutical and life sciences company. The currently makes $35 billion annually in revenue and is constantly looking to gain a competitive technological edge in the industry. I could imagine some use cases for them, like all the complex calculations that need to be done to develop certain medicine tests. Mainstream corporations might become interested in Golem once the platform has matured and proven itself.
Team
Golem has 26 team members in total. Team members consist of Founders, Software Engineers, Testers, UI/UX Designer, Dev Ops, Strategy, HR, and more. The team has a diverse and reputable background: many members of the team helped develop the original Ethereum protocol. Team members work from all over: EU, US, Asia and Australia. But they mainly work from either the offices in Warsaw, Germany or from New York City, to be closer to other blockchain influencers and investors.
It's important to note that the Golem team has publically stated they do not plan to sell their Golem stake until Golem has really taken off and gone mainstream. The team also raised 820,000 ETH during their initial funding phase, most of which has been converted to Fiat cash and has not been spent. They are in no rush to cash in and want to help improve the world!
Below is Julian Zawistowski, the CEO and face (literally) of Golem. Julian has been the CEO and founder of a couple of different startups, Imapp and Claimstorm. Julian has successfully lead the team through a multitude of challenges. He does a lot of AMA threads to inform investors of Golem development process, he is extremely transparent. He does frequent interviews with the media as well. In my opinion, you want a CEO that has a lot of prior experience, in order to lead the team to greatness.
Next Development Steps for Golem
The Golem team recently released Brass on the Ethereum blockchain on April 10, 2018. They are extremely found of what they accomplished. They were supposed to deliver brass a year prior in May 2017. What they have accomplished is unprecedented and they are a first market mover in the CGI rendering decentralized marketplace.
Here are the Golem team’s next steps for release:
• Consent service: Finalization and launch to increase network security
• GPU support will be added to Golem (right now we’re only supporting CPU)
• Proprietary software support: this is key to achieve the goal of onboarding more rendering software.
• New use cases: We will explore both by doing custom integrations and increasing Golem’s versatility by simplifying the process of software integration into our platform.
Coinbase
Brian Armstrong the CEO of Coinbase, the most widely used crypto platform from a mobile perspective has favored Golem as one of his favorite cryptocurrencies.
“Armstrong sees value in so-called “utility tokens”, and he offered Filecoin and Golem as two examples of such tokens.”
In March of 2018, Coinbase declared that they were going to allowed to add any ERC20 token to its platform. Historically they will post this before releasing a token and has been evidenced by the Ethereum, Litecoin, and Bitcoin Cash releases. I’m willing to put my money on Golem to be added as one of the first tokens. We all know the GDAX/Coinbase token has a 3x-10x price increase almost right away.
Price Predictions & Conclusion
I’m no wizard with a crystal ball, but I think the upside for Golem is tremendous. The highest it has ever been in USD terms is $1.24 or roughly a $1 billion market cap. I think Golem conservatively has the potential to be a $10 billion market cap crypto, putting the value at about $12. The value could be exponentially bigger in 5-10 years. Just as Google and Amazon were birthed out of the dot com era and are still successful, I think Golem will one of the few survivors after the cryptomania ends.
John McAfee has historically made remarkably correct crypto price predictions for Tron and Verge: he recently predicted the price of GNT to moon and is likely to hit the $5 mark by Q3. Mcafee has a large influence in this market, and he may know something we do not know.
When people find out they can make extra money by leaving their laptops on, and companies like Bayer or movie productions like Pixar can get the service cheaper from the Golem network than an expensive Amazon Web services provider…the price is set to skyrocket. In order to get this great technology in people's hands, Golem needs to increase its marketing of the product. To restate what I said earlier, the Golem team raised 820,000 ETH during their initial funding phase, most of which has been converted to Fiat cash and has no been spent. They are in no rush to cash in and want to help improve the world! They spent the last 3 years developing Brass Golem. Now they just have to sell it.
I hope this article helped you. Let me know your thoughts on Golem (GNT). If you leave a well thought out comment, I will upvote!