Reflections on cryptocurrency: GOLEM

Steemians!
This is another crypto that captured my interest and here are my reflections! This is entirely based on what I can find on the web... If anyone is involved in Golem project and has "insider informations" please let us know!

Name: Golem (GNT)

Website: https://golem.network

Market cap: $435,499,133

Type: decentralised, self-regulating, peer-to-peer network

License: Open source and distributed under GPLv3 license

Developers:
Julian Zawistowski (CEO, founder), Piotr Janiuk (CTO, co-founder), Andrzej Regulski (COO, co-founder) and other people 7 people (cited in the whitepaper) participating in the development team

General description
Golem connects computers in a peer-to-peer network, enabling both application owners and individual users ("requestors") to rent resources of other users’ ("providers") machines. These resources can be used to complete tasks requiring computation time and capacity. At present similar resources are available, but supplied by centralized cloud providers and are constrained by closed networks and proprietary payment systems. Golem also offers a built-in Ethereum-based transaction system, which enables direct payments between requestors, providers, and software developers.

Main purposes:
The aim of the Golem project is to create a global market for computing power, in which producers can sell CPU time of their personal computers and consumers may acquire resources for computation-intensive tasks. Golem Project believes in a truly decentralized network, enabling users to securely and directly exchange content, without sharing it with corporations.

Maturity:
The alpha version was launched in August 2016. The alpha version (codename Brass Golem) will be focused on CGI rendering in Blender (blender.org) and is mainly proof of concept.

Technology:
Golem building the transaction framework on Ethereum. The network comprise people (computer) who is selling (providers) computational power and who is looking for it (requestors). Golem transaction system matches providers and requestors, taking into account prices, reputations and machines' performances. This process will verify the results and if confirmed provider will issue the payment.

Mining and currency supply:
The Golem Network Token (GNT) is a token on Ethereum platform. The supply of GNT will be limited to the pool of tokens created during crowd-funding period. Total on created token is 1.000.000.000. During the crowd-founding period the participants willing to support development of the Golem Project can do so by sending ether to the designated address.

Proof algorithm:
Based upon the Ethereum algorithm. Golem is a “Usage Token”. If you want to use the services in Golem then you will need to pay with Golem Network Token (GNT).

Community:
Golem Team is a group of people working on Golem project. At the moment working in imapp, but after crowd-funding - working in Golem Factory GmbH. This means they already have a critical mass of developers and they should be able to scale their operations if enough funds are raised. There is no real open source community.

Sponsors:
Golem project was initially privately funded and subsequently crowd-founded (now completed).

Strategy and roadmap:
Planned milestones for Golem development are:

Brass Golem: proof-of-concept, in alpha testing now. Focused on rendering in Blender and LuxRender, and although it will be useful to CGI artists, they are using CGI rendering as a proof of concept and also a training ground.
Clay Golem: This introduces the Task API and the Application Registry, which together are going to make Golem a multi-purpose, generalized distributed computation solution.
Stone Golem: Aims to add more security and stability, but also enhance the functionalities implemented in Clay.

Potential risks:
The big risk of project is that every milestone of the roadmap depends on the funding and critical mass of people working on it. They have now reached the proof of concept stage, but need to scale out. Ambitious project, which hopefully will deliver a functioning plataform in the next few months.

Trading exchanges:
Poloniex, Yunbi, Bittrex, Liqui (All exchange trade GNT only in other cryptocurrency).