Julian Zawistowski, the founder, and CEO of Golem, recently stated that Ethereum is by far the most promising blockchain platform and it doesn’t have any real competitors in terms of applicability and future potential.
Zawistowski’s statement came shortly after Golem, the 47th largest digital currency in the world (by market cap), had started trading on South Korea’s largest cryptocurrency exchange Bithumb.
Golem is possible because of the ethereum blockchain
Golem is a decentralized supercomputer that can draw computing power from every machine on its network — be it a home computer or large data centers.
In other words, Golem is an Airbnb-equivalent in the world of blockchain and supercomputers. It lets you loan out your computer’s spare resources to other users who are in need of additional computing power to perform complicated computations and tasks. Of course, there is a price on your contribution to the network, and it comes in the form of free Golem tokens, currently valued at just under $0.5 (and a market cap of $396,335,707 USD).
Alternatively, you could also rent computing power from other Golem network users to perform computing power-intensive tasks such as CGI rendering, machine learning for DNA exploration, natural language processing, and so on.
During a recently held TNW Answers session, Zawistowski was asked the reason behind his decision to prioritize ethereum over other blockchain networks. The Golem CEO responded:
“We have been supporting and building on top of Ethereum since its very early days. In fact, we realized that Golem would be possible to be built and work on Ethereum and thanks to Ethereum.”
Scalability is a cause for concern
As a side effect of its ever-increasing popularity, ethereum has long-suffered from scalability issues. Because of this, the platform cannot sustain a large number of users in its network without facing some repercussions.
This was evident last year when Cryptokitties — a game built on top of the ethereum network — went viral. As the number of users playing Cryptokitties started hitting one high after another, the network faced a severe congestion — so much so that there was a 600% spike in the number of pending transactions.
One of the questioners at the TNW Answers asked Zawistowski if these scalability issues could prompt him to part ways with ethereum and migrate to another network. The Golem CEO dismissed any such possibility saying that while scalability is definitely an issue, Golem currently has no better alternative to turn to.
“Ethereum is by far the most promising platform and we cannot see another one that’s remotely close to it,” he said, adding: “Of course we would like to interact with the blockchain more and once Ethereum scales we will be able to do it in a wider manner.”
It is worth noting here that Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, recently released a new proof of concept that underlines how the sharding scalability solutions proposed earlier can be deployed onto ethereum’s main chain. For further details, the geekier amongst you can head over to Github and have a peek at Buterin’s proof of concept.
