Those that have been involved with cryptocurrencies for some time have probably heard of the Golem (GNT) project before, because it was a very popular ICO a couple years ago. At that time it was quite promising looking, but then missed deadlines and new projects sent it into the shadows, where it remained until just recently. When the Golem team finally released its beta main net launch this past April the light shone on the project again. Investors recalled the early promise of Golem and had another look. They found that it still looks quite promising. And with that in mind it seems appropriate to have another look at the Golem project and the prospects for it and its native coin, the Golem GNT. What is Golem? Golem Overview The team feels this is a good first offering as 3D rendering is extremely processing-intensive and can be quite costly. As an example, let’s say you’re an animator and have created a scene in Blender that you’d like to render in full HD-resolution. You could do the rendering on your own computer, but depending on how powerful your processer is that could take days or even weeks. It’s not likely anyone wants to wait that long to render a scene. There are other options if you want it rendered more quickly. One option would be to outsource the rendering to a rendering farm. These are dedicated services that offer to rapidly render 3D animation and other modeling. They are also very expensive. And they can be fully booked at times, meaning there’s still a delay in how long it takes to have your scene rendered. Golem Technology This is great for animators who need fast, inexpensive rendering. It’s also great for anyone who has spare computing power – and that’s pretty much anyone who has an idle computer in their home. The Golem network allows you to sell your spare computing power and get paid in GNT tokens. With the launch of the Brass Golem beta the Blender renders are the only real-life application available, but that will change in the future as the Golem team has plans for many other real-life applications. Pretty much any task that uses significant processing power can be improved through the use of the Golem distributed network. Golem Rendering Application Golem GNT Token With the GNT transactions occurring on the blockchain there’s no worries about failure to pay or a breach of contract. And the actual file transfers and rendering occurs off the blockchain, so there’s no need to worry about the throughput of the network. GNT was pre-mined and there are a total of 1 billion GNT in existence, but just 959,242,000 in circulation. The token was sold in an ICO that took place on November 9, 2016. The ICO raised roughly $8 million and tokens were sold at $0.01 each. Binance GNT The GNT token is trading on many different exchanges, with the largest volume trading on Bithumb. There’s also a good amount of volume on Bittrex, OKex, Binance and the Huobi Exchange. It is worth pointing out that the Golem team has no intention to boost the value of the token. Their intent is simply to use the GNT as a payment means on the Golem network, and they have no partnerships with exchanges or any plans to market the token as a speculative investment. Once you have your Golem tokens you will want to move them off of the exchange into a cryptocurrrency wallet. Keeping a large holding of crypto on an exchange is not a wise move given the numerous risks that are posed by the likes of hackers etc. We have covered a list of some of the top Golem wallets where you can store your GNT. The Golem Team Golem Team Members GNT Price Forecast The GNT should have room to grow from current levels, but with only one use case I wouldn’t expect a huge amount of growth. If the team can add more use cases, or even better create a platform that’s much easier to use than the current Golem network setup we could see huge upside for the token. Currently it’s simply too technical and complex to get a node up and running and to purchase rendering time. Golem Wallet Download needs to make this far easier for non-technical people to gain mass adoption. With Golem Wallet Download said, even the rendering market is big, and with additional use cases added the processor usage market is immense. Consider the billions in profits being made by the likes of Amazon, Google and Microsoft with their cloud businesses. We could see slow steady growth for GNT until a major use case is added or a simple platform is unveiled. Golem Adoption Timeline Golem Roadmap You can see the masterplan of the team here to get an idea of where the project is headed. Conclusion Of course Golem is only in its infancy now, but in the coming 4 or 5 years they could conceivably already have millions of computers all contributing processing power to complete massive tasks quickly and seemingly effortlessly. The downside to Golem right now is the lack of marketing from the development team, and the slow pace at which they seem to be working. Fortunately for them there is no other project that is close to what they’re doing, but the slow pace could end up being their downfall if a strong competitor arises. They do have a strong community following them however, with a lot of attention on Reddit following their main net launch, and nearly 150k Twitter followers. In the coming months it would be great to see the team expand from its base in Poland and add some global team members, as well as creating some strong partnerships. It would also be great to see the pace of development increase, but I suppose that’s true for most blockchain projects. |