On the 10th of April, Golem was released on the Ethereum main net. Recently I tested the latest version of Golem and over a month ago I tested the rendering with the Alpha version. In the meantime the Golem network has been steadily growing and also another update was released, Beta 0.15.1. Further I tried to find the answers to some questions I had and checked the statistics of the network.
Golem Statistics
From the 11th of April I downloaded the statistics of the Golem Network available on https://stats.golem.network/show. After three weeks, the graph below shows that the number of nodes is growing quite fast. From 7.529 on the 11th of April to just over 9.703 today, an increase of 29%. It is good to see the network is growing but this off course also brings a problem to the network, as there are many more suppliers than requesters. The number of nodes on the testnet shows the same pattern. The average number of CPU cores suppliers make available is 4.4. Most nodes run on Windows (69%) followed by Linux (19%) and Darwin (12%). In total 181.385 (96%) subtasks succeeded, 2.901 failed and 4.986 timed out.
Frequently asked questions
After running Golem the past weeks, I completed 11 tasks, earning me a total of 2.06 GNT. While running the application I visited the Golem Chat and Reddit regularly to get some answers to the questions I had and to see how other people are experiencing Golem. I noticed that a lot of people were wondering why they still did not earn any GNT (after running the application for a couple of hours). The answer to this question is already given in the paragraph above, the number of suppliers is high, so it can take a long time to complete/find a task. I was also wondering why my balance was not visible on Etherscan when I looked up my address, the answer to this question is that the GNT is in the wrapper of Golem, GNTB. This way Golem can facilitate batch transfers and reduce gas costs. You can check your balance by visiting: https://etherscan.io/token/0xa7dfb33234098c66fde44907e918dad70a3f211c#readContract and fill in your address which is available in Golem application. I also noticed only 2 of my tasks have the status completed, the other are still “awaiting”. To reduce costs, Golem transfers the tokens in batches, so it can take up to 30 days before tasks are eventually completed.
The new update has a list of improvements, for example: gas usage is reduced, the task duration computation is changed, possibility to restart single subtask after task deadline and other improvements. It can be stated that the network is growing and the more people use the network, the faster it will improve. I will keep giving updates about the network and the statistics.
Thanks for the nice Overview. Do you think Golem needs additional GPU Support to become more efficient and therefore cheaper for the industry?
No problem! Well yeah i think they need to and will add GPU support, but firstly i would like to see more different ways to use the network, like machine learning etc.