What is it?

"Computing Power. Shared" straight from Golem's website, their message is simple. The world is filled with computers, and just like many other physical assets, the majority of their time is spent idle and unused. Golem is looking to solve this by allowing users to delegate their excess computing power to the Golem network, creating in effect, a virtual, decentralized supercomputer. Currently, in their Brass version, they are only allowing for CGI rendering but will expand to allow other services in the future

How Does it Work?

Golem has three types of users:

• Providers: or individuals leasing computing power.
• Requesters: individuals using the network.
• Authors: individuals who have created applications to run on top of the golem network (think dApps)

(Golem also has validators who are users that test applications to filter out malicious content)

Providers will delegate a portion of their computers processing power to the Golem network. The cumulative effect of this is a decentralized super computer that can fulfill requests.

Key Competitors

There are already a lot of players in the cloud computing space (Amazon, Microsoft and IBM to name a few), yet Golem was the first to enter the market as a completely decentralized option. To date a few other players have entered the game (SONM, Gridcoin and Iexec) yet Golem still holds the largest market cap. The decentralized options listed above all have key advantages over centralized options (AWS, etc) such as:

• low barrier to entry for providers
• each provider has a relatively small market share (losing one computer won't damage the network)
• the supply/demand of computing power is transparent

Weak Points

• It's running off the Ethereum network which has its own hurdles to overcome (not saying that it won't)
• Has big competition from preexisting market share holders
• Need to ship more product (they have been slow in rolling out functional executables)

Hot Or Not?

Hot! The cloud computing market is a multi trillion dollar industry. Whether you choose to back Golem or one of it's competitors (or all of them) the likelihood that decentralized cloud computing will exist in the future is high!

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