Supercomputer has been one of the most important criteria evaluating the technological advancement in our modern days. Financial services, military complex, logistics, space aviation...pretty much every industry has a rising demand for a better and faster computational power, and that trend has no sign to slow down in any way.
What about the average Joe who wants to get some computational work done without financial backing of tax payers’ dollars or VCs? Here is the answer - utilizing spare computational power around the world through the blockchain technology.
Supercomputer in Blockchain
Ethereum is often cited as a “world-computer” backed by blockchain technology, isn’t it? Well, Ethereum is definitely not designed to do the stuff as Titan does. It is more like a kindergarten playground, where a bunch of kiddos are running around and having fun on their own (sometimes maybe team up with their best buddies), abiding the common rules - be nice to each other - arbitrary consensus algorithm is uphold in a way that smart contracts can be executed safely. The time and energy they have spent in the playground comes with a price - poor efficiency. What if we can maximize the resources over the network and concentrate on one task? Like the well-trained soldiers for one single purpose - win the battle.
Golem
Golem (GNT), Ethereum-based supercomputer, has attracted a great deal of attention, as well as $8.6 million within 30 minutes during its ICO (11/11/2016) [1]. It claims to be used in computer graphics, business, machine learning, cryptography and science. The latest release [2], Brass Golem Alpha2 0.8, is still focusing on the computer graphic applications - namely, running Blender (a professional, free and open-source 3D computer graphics software toolset used for creating animated films, visual effects, art, 3D printed models, interactive 3D applications and video games). Surprisingly, several months of “seriously difficult work” passed since its ICO, the one and only usage is still in a testing phase.
According to its Github Insight Graphs [3], this multimillion-dollar project seems to be strangely quiet since November 2016, due to “seriously difficult” challenges in handling Blender apps. Pretty alarming? Isn’t it?
Since the beginning of the bullish market in cryptocurrencies this year, we have seen exponential growth of ICOs based on ERC20 tokens (Ethereum), Waves, Omni, NEO (formerly known as AntShares), EOS and Nxt. At the time of writing, around $1.25 billion [4] has been raised in 2017. Our getting-rich-quick mentality and FOMO have been propelling crypto newcomers and seasoned investors/speculators to throw in their hard-earn money without a second thought. I am not going to list the names here, but many of them share remarkably common traits, such as incomplete white papers plagued with grammar/formatting mistakes , groundbreaking promises without products, halted code development after fund raising, expensive champagnes, luxury vacations...and probably exotic escorts? Anyways, personally I have chosen to stay away from all ICOs for now. However, I am confident the overly crowded ICO tokens atmosphere will have a few true winners in the end. I just do not know when.
Elastic (XEL)
Elastic could be one of the earliest projects proposing the idea of “supercomputer in the blockchain”. It started back in March, 2016 [5]. After the initial donation and the departure of the original dev “Lannister”, the project has been under intense development by the community. Two current leading devs are “Evil-Knieve”l and “coralreefer” [6]. Their Github activities are shown below [7, 8].
Despite of the absence of a clear roadmap, they are going to have a major release in 1~2 weeks. What intrigues me is that this is a fully functional product! One youtube demo video shows you how to use the Elastic Supercomputer to mine Bitcoin [9]! You heard that right - using the spare computational power to do the mining. Yes, they may not have a well-versed PR team, or a fancy water-fall style website. But they have a fully functional set of codes, an open-source and community-driven devs team. It is just a matter of time when people realize the market cap of Elastic is around $46 million [10], less than a fifth of Golem (GNT) $256 million as of 08/27/2017 [11]. What is more interesting is that the total supply of XEL is 100 million, 10% of GNT’s 1 billion coins in total.
In conclusion
Elastic needs more publicity through social media channels, while Golem has a lot of room to improve except its PR team. I will continue my research in the supercomputer powered by blockchain technology. Please let me know what you think by leaving a comment below.
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