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Golem, The Future Of Cloud Computing

May 3, 2017 4:55 PM ET
Summary

What is Golem?

How can I invest?

Price predictions in the coming months and years.

Diversifying your portfolio.

In a previous article, I talked about how Ethereum is changing the internet. In that article, which would be helpful to have read to understand this article, I briefly mentioned a decentralized application being worked on called Golem. In this post I will examine the importance and potential price movements of the application.

Here is a quote from Golem's website explaining what their Golem is:

"Golem is a global, open sourced, decentralized supercomputer that anyone can access. It's made up of the combined power of user's machines, from personal laptops to entire datacenters.

Anyone will be able to use Golem to compute (almost) any program you can think of, from rendering to research to running websites, in a completely decentralized & inexpensive way.

The Golem Network is a decentralized sharing economy of computing power, where anyone can make money "renting" out their computing power or developing & selling software."
Golem can be thought of as an Airbnb for your computer. It allows anyone in the world to rent out computing power from anyone else in the world. Say someone has a computer that sits at home all day while they're working. Instead of collecting dust they would be able to rent out the computing power to anyone, like a graphic designer in New York or a movie producer in Los Angeles. It is not just a person like you or me who can rent their computer power, large databases can also do the same. Golem makes it easy and affordable to do complex computations such as rendering CGI or solving scientific calculations.

The Golem Network benefits three groups of people as indicated from their Whitepaper, which can be found on the Golem.Network website.

Group Golem Feature Incentive To Participate
Requesters Golem offers tools to execute computer-intensive tasks. Requesters get access to affordable and scalable solutions, which combine hardware and software.
Providers Golem combines and utilizes almost any kind of existing computing hardware. Hardware providers get paid for providing and renting out their hardware.
Software Developers Golem is a flexible platform to deploy and monetize software. Software developers use Golem as a distribution channel, associated with access to hardware.
Back to the Airbnb example, providers have incentives to list their house on Airbnb because they are not using it and will receive payments from requesters. Golem's interface makes it easy for providers to set prices and decide how much of their unused resource they are willing to rent out similar to how Airbnb lets you determine how much you want to rent your house for.

Investing in Golem

Seeing the value behind this project is something most of you will understand just from my short explanation. Investing into Golem would involve buying the tokens used to rent computing power in the hopes that more people will begin to use this network, which would increase the price per token.

To purchase the Golem Network Token (NYSE:GNT) you will first need to own ETH, which I explain how that can be done in the article linked earlier. With that ETH you will be able to go on certain exchanges that have GNT for sale. The exchange I use is called Poloniex. However, they only have the price listed in relation to ETH. To check the price of GNT to USD I use a site called coinmarketcap.com. If this sounds complex or like a lot of work I suggest browsing the Poloniex exchange for a few minutes and you will realize it is nothing to shy away from due to the fear of complexity.

Price Analysis

This past week GNT has rose from $.10 to a high of $.25 and is currently settled around $.22. To understand this recent price movement I need to explain Golem's project timeline briefly. Right now the Golem developers are working towards completing their first goal called Brass Golem, which includes many basic components to their end product. They estimated completion of this in their whitepapers to be 6 months. This is month six and in a tweet from their official twitter they said it will be completed on time. The soon to be release of Brass Golem has already sparked more interest in the dapp, I expect when the actual release happens the price will jump up even higher, possibly in the 40 cents range.

After this month the next goal in the project timeline is Clay Golem, which includes varies components set to be released randomly between a 6 and 15 month from the beginning of the project (November 2016), the next stage is called Stone Golem with components being released 15-24 months from November 2016 and the final stage has estimated time of component arrivals ranging from 24-48 months down the line.

As you can tell Golem is very much in its infancy. Investing now has potential for enormous returns but with any new project there is also a great risk factor. Short term there is close to a guarantee to make positive returns, making Golem something you should consider immediately.

Fitting in your Portfolio?

With investing in any cryptocurrency it is a great way to diversify further than many other portfolios. The crypto market is an entirely new one with a lot of money to be made. Investing in the underlying platform like with Bitcoin or Ethereum is great for right now, but if the future of the Internet is truly decentralized like how I believe it will be, then dapps like Golem will be household names. At $.22 even a small investment has potential to be a wise investment. As always do your due diligence by researching outside of this article. A great place to start would be the company's whitepapers, which I linked early in this paper.

Disclosure: I am/we are long GOLEM.

I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.