Cryptocurrency began as a way to change how we think about money.

Over the past few years, this radical and innovative new thinking has infiltrated and morphed into a whole lot of other aspects of technology and life as we know it.
In this day and age, the internet is a major part of our lives and there are a number of coins and projects who have their sights set on changing how that works too.

Ethereum’s Virtual Machine, Shift, Maidsafe, and Golem are a few that are working towards decentralizing the internet and allowing you to monetize your unused computer space and power.

Today I’m focusing on Golem. But don’t worry, I’ll be covering the others in videos soon to come.

Golem is ranked number 14 on coinmarketcap.com with a price of .51 cents per coin.

• Total supply of Golem or GNT is capped at 1 billion coins

• The current circulating supply totaling 829 million.

• 24 hour volume is around $9.4 million

• The market cap is about $424 million.

Golem’s website

states it is

"A global, open sourced, decentralized super computer that anyone can access." ... "A sharing economy of computing power where anyone can make money by renting out their computing power or developing & selling software."

Use cases for Golem include:

• Computer graphics

• Machine learning, or AI

• Cryptography and mining

• And more

Because Golem uses the Ethereum network, they use an ethereum-based transaction system to clear payments between providers, requestors and software developers.

Despite being called a pump and dump, which I think every alt coin at one point has been labeled as such, Golem as a cryptocurrency is quite promising. The team behind it has been working constantly to bring their project to life.

Right now Golem is in its Alpha stage with a solid team testing the software.

Furthermore, the crowd sale for Golem raised a commendable $6.8 million which has since grown over $100 million.

Golem runs on the Ethereum network with a team consisting of 15 individuals, 9 of which are software engineers, an ethereum engineer, and a p2p engineer and advisor.

Golem is open source, meaning you’re free to check out their work on GitHub and see just how actively they are working on their project.

Golem has some competition in the form of big name companies, like Amazon, Microsoft and other cloud storage service providers. Golem certainly has an edge with decentralization, and the potential to utilize thousands of computers and data centers to achieve fast, powerful computations, but I think they’ll have to consider how to compete with the other services that these big name companies provide that make them attractive to customers.

Additional Reading/Sources:

Golem Website
Golem Teams Explains Motivations for Project
Golem Blog
Medium Article Giving Good Critique of Golem
Medium Article Covering Golem's Progress