# Golem Network > Golem Network review. The original decentralised compute network (2016). Permissionless P2P marketplace, 82% ICO distribution, zero protocol revenue. Freedom Score and honest assessment. - Scores: Freedom 6.9/10 (grade C), Returns 4.6/10 (grade D) - Category: compute · Token: GLM - Published: 2026-03-06 · Updated: 2026-10-13 - Canonical: https://ownyourmind.ai/projects/golem/ - Data (scores + integrity verdicts, JSON): https://ownyourmind.ai/api/projects/golem.json - Cite as: Own Your Mind (ownyourmind.ai), licence CC BY 4.0. Link the canonical URL. Charts and interactive widgets are omitted here; their data is in the JSON above. --- ## What it does Golem Network is a peer-to-peer marketplace for computing power, one of the oldest decentralised compute projects in existence. Conceived in 2014, presented at DEVCON0, and funded via a legendary 2016 ICO that raised 820,000 ETH (~$8.6M) in under an hour, Golem connects **Providers** (who share spare CPU/GPU resources) with **Requestors** (who consume compute) using the GLM token as the payment medium. The core software is **Yagna**, an open-source Rust framework that handles task negotiation, execution, and payment. Providers run Yagna on their own hardware. There are no centralised data centres. Requestors submit jobs which are split into subtasks and distributed across provider nodes for parallel processing. Supported workloads include 3D rendering/CGI (the original use case), AI model inference, scientific simulations, zero-knowledge proof generation (via Satori integration), and general-purpose batch compute. Pricing runs approximately $0.001/core-hour for CPU and $0.01/core-hour for GPU, claimed to be 70-90% below AWS equivalent. Payments operate on Ethereum mainnet and Polygon L2 (added 2021). Yagna v0.16.0 (August 2024) introduced a smart contract deposit mechanism allowing end-users to pre-pay for compute through a lock contract. Founded by **Julian Zawistowski**, **Piotr Janiuk**, **Aleksandra Skrzypczak**, and **Andrzej Regulski**. The entity is **Golem Factory GmbH**, registered in Zug, Switzerland. In 2019, Zawistowski and Regulski departed to establish the **Golem Foundation**, a separate non-profit entity pursuing "riskier" research. Over $40M in ETH and GNT was transferred from Factory to Foundation, a significant leadership and treasury split. Current leadership: Piotr Janiuk (CEO, co-founder, mathematics/CS, University of Warsaw), Przemyslaw Rekucki (CTO), Pawel Burgchardt (CPO), Arkadiusz Cybulski (Head of AI/GPU). **Brass Golem** (2018) was one of the first Ethereum mainnet applications. The token migrated from GNT to GLM (ERC-20, 1:1 swap, no deadline) in 2020. ## Value proposition The OG decentralised compute network with ten years of continuous development. Golem's value proposition is simple: permissionless, censorship-resistant computing power at 70-90% below cloud provider pricing. ### Recent expansion: Salad partnership, Arkiv, Ecosystem Fund The most commercially significant recent development is the **Salad.com partnership** (January 2026). Salad is a GPU cloud platform that claims $200M+ in annual revenue, and the engineering test mirrors Salad's commercial workloads (AI inference, 3D rendering, drug discovery simulations) onto Golem's permissionless execution layer. If this progresses beyond testing, it represents Golem's first real commercial integration at scale. **Arkiv** extends Golem's reach: a decentralised database and data availability layer operating as an L2 on Ethereum with L3 DB-Chains, using GLM for data writes. This is a meaningful extension of GLM utility beyond compute. The **Ecosystem Fund** has supported six projects including Web3 Pi (Ethereum nodes on Raspberry Pi), Satori Network (ZK proving, mainnet integration July 2025), and Keccak Optimization (ZK proof research). ### The counter-narrative: zero revenue, slowing development, leadership split The counter-narrative is severe: **Golem has zero protocol revenue.** The protocol charges 0% commission on provider earnings, so GLM earned by providers is sold immediately, creating high token velocity with no value capture. After ten years of building, the protocol has no sustainable revenue model, and the team's finances depend on the Foundation's treasury rather than protocol fees. That treasury is mostly verifiable on-chain. We directly read roughly 11,300 ETH plus 50 million GLM in the Foundation wallets. The larger piece is 100,000 ETH that the Foundation stakes through Octant, its public-goods project, which the December 2023 announcement describes as 3,125 solo validators on the Nimbus client, a public top-20 staking pool. That is a named, beacon-chain-countable validator set rather than an opaque third-party position; we have corroborated the validator count from the announcement and the rewards wallet that accrues the staking ETH, though we have not yet pinned the exact validator set ourselves. The treasury is held in tokens, so what it is worth moves with ETH rather than with anything Golem does. Read on 17 August 2026 it comes to roughly $215 million against a GLM market cap near $88 million, about two and a half times over. The multiple matters more than the dollar figure: at any ETH price within recent range the treasury dwarfs the market cap, which is the actual point. Development velocity remains low. The yagna core repo had commits in March 2026 (including a VPN integration merge) and a nightly pre-release dated 2 May 2026, so the earlier "no commits since October 2025" framing was wrong. But blog frequency has dropped to roughly one post per quarter, and Modelserve AI (the key AI product) has been temporarily suspended. Akash, Render, and io.net have all gained more market traction in the AI compute narrative in the meantime. The 2019 leadership split is concerning. Two entities (Factory and Foundation) with shared token but divergent strategies and separate treasuries. The Factory builds the protocol; the Foundation pursues research. Coordination between them is unclear. For the sovereignty thesis, Golem scores well. The network is explicitly designed as censorship-resistant computing. Anyone can join without permission or KYC. All core code is GPL-3.0 licensed, with a few dozen contributors on the yagna repo. The 82% ICO distribution is one of the fairest in crypto history. The architecture is verifiably permissionless and decentralised. That fairness-without-value-capture bet is the mirror image of Akash, which takes a fee and burns its token against lease revenue: see [Akash vs Golem](https://ownyourmind.ai/tokenomics/akash-vs-golem/). ### Security review, September 2026 Golem's [23 September 2026 security update](https://blog.golem.network/golem-network-security-review-update/) says 76 reports were assessed and 36 issues confirmed and fixed: 1 Critical, 6 High, 15 Medium and 18 Low. The Critical one let a crafted task request make file operations escape the task directory in the provider daemon, yagna, which Golem says could expose host files and potentially open a path to remote code execution. Golem says requestors were not affected and the fixes ship in v0.17.10 and later, including v0.18.0, both of which GitHub shows released on 14 September 2026. Sherlock's forensic review of 33 provider setups found no evidence of exploitation, and Golem says it can't rule exploitation out entirely. It recommends providers rotate secrets held on affected hosts and says it's launching a new bug bounty run by Sherlock. Anyone who ran an older provider on a machine holding wallet keys or other secrets should rotate them. ## Tokenomics GLM has a fixed supply of 1 billion tokens, **100% circulating.** No inflation, no future emissions, no remaining unlocks, no vesting. FDV equals market cap. This is about as clean as token supply gets. The 2016 ICO distributed 82% of tokens to participants, extraordinary by any standard. Golem Factory received 12%, and the team received 6%. All tokens were immediately liquid. GLM is used for compute payment (sole currency between requestors and providers), smart contract deposits for pre-payment (v0.16), and Arkiv data writes. There's no staking mechanism, no burn mechanism, no governance token weighting, and no fee-sharing. The protocol charges 0% commission. The token velocity problem is structural. Providers earn GLM for compute and sell it for operating costs. Without staking lock-ups, burn mechanics, or protocol fee capture, there are no supply-side sinks. Token value depends entirely on compute demand exceeding sell pressure from providers. GLM is roughly 89% below its GLM-era ATH of $0.86 (November 2021); measured against the GNT-era high of $1.32 in 2018 (CoinGecko's recorded all-time high for the asset) it is down about 93%. Listed on 44 venues on CoinGecko's 13 October 2026 read, including Binance, Coinbase, OKX, KuCoin, and Upbit. 21,341 holders on Ethereum, remarkably low for a 2016-vintage token. (figures as of 2026-09-20) ## How to participate **Become a Provider.** Share spare CPU/GPU resources. Install Yagna, configure hardware, earn GLM from requestors. Permissionless, no KYC. Technical skill: intermediate. **Submit Compute Jobs.** Use the Yagna SDK (Python, TypeScript) or CLI to distribute tasks across the network. Pay in GLM. Pricing ~$0.001/core-hour CPU, ~$0.01/core-hour GPU. Technical skill: intermediate to advanced. **Build on Arkiv.** Use the L2/L3 data availability layer for decentralised database applications. GLM used for data writes. Technical skill: advanced. ## Honest assessment ## Freedom Score: 69/100 Ten years in, Golem is still one of the most honestly built compute networks in crypto. The token distribution and open-source credentials are hard to argue with. **Infrastructure Decentralisation: 14/20.** Permissionless P2P network: anyone can join as provider or requestor without permission. Providers run their own hardware. Payments on Ethereum and Polygon. Relay infrastructure and task matching involve some centralised coordination points. Provider count is modest compared to competitors like Akash or io.net. **Governance Decentralisation: 10/20.** GAPs (Golem Amendment Proposals) exist as a governance mechanism since 2020. In practice, Golem Factory GmbH retains control over protocol development, roadmap, and treasury. The 2019 split created two entities which distributes power somewhat, but neither is community-governed. No formal DAO. Ecosystem Fund allocation is team-directed. **Token Distribution Fairness: 11/15.** 82% of tokens went to ICO participants, one of the fairest distributions in crypto history for a 2016 project. Only 18% to team/company. Fully circulated with no remaining unlocks. The $40M+ transfer to Foundation concentrates significant resources, but the initial distribution was exemplary. **Censorship Resistance: 11/15.** Explicitly designed as censorship-resistant computing. Permissionless participation without KYC. Supports arbitrary workloads. However, providers choose which tasks to accept, and the network's small scale means a coordinated attack is feasible. No specific anti-censorship technology like encrypted task delegation. **Data Sovereignty: 10/15.** Requestors send tasks to providers, so data leaves the requestor's machine. Plans for VPN capabilities and SGX exist but are not in production. No TEE or confidential computing currently deployed. Arkiv extends data sovereignty concepts. Current data privacy during compute is limited. **Open Source Transparency: 13/15.** All core code GPL-3.0 licensed. 100+ repos, a few dozen contributors on yagna. OpenZeppelin audited the original GNT contract in 2016; Trail of Bits and CertiK audited the GLM token and its migration contract in November 2020. Team is identifiable and public-facing. Development cadence is low overall, though core components were pushed in August 2026 and yagna in September 2026. Foundation activities are less transparent than Factory's. ## Returns Score: 46/100 **Token Utility: 10/20.** GLM functions solely as a payment medium: requestors pay providers in GLM. The deposit mechanism adds smart contract locking for pre-payment. Arkiv extends utility to data writes. However, there's no staking requirement, no governance voting weight, no fee-sharing mechanism. The token is a pure medium of exchange, relatively thin utility compared to tokens with staking, governance, and burn mechanics. **Value Accrual: 6/20.** GLM has no burn mechanism, no staking rewards, no protocol fee capture, and no revenue sharing. The token's value depends entirely on demand for compute priced in GLM. With no supply-side sinks, token velocity is high: providers earn and sell immediately. The deposit mechanism creates temporary lock-up but not permanent value accrual. FDV = market cap (no dilution), which is the sole positive. **Supply Dynamics: 14/20.** Strong fundamentals: fixed 1B supply, no inflation, no future emissions, no remaining unlocks. FDV = market cap. 82% distributed to public. All vesting complete (there never was any). Clean structure. Deducted for: no deflationary mechanism, no staking lock-up, and ~20% held by team/foundation entities. **Revenue Sustainability: 5/25.** Golem charges 0% commission, so the protocol captures zero revenue from usage, and pricing at $0.001-$0.01/core-hour is exceptionally low. Sustainability therefore depends on the Foundation treasury. We directly verified ~11,300 ETH plus 50 million GLM in the Foundation wallets; the larger 100,000 ETH is staked through Octant as 3,125 solo validators (a public top-20 pool per the Foundation's Dec-2023 announcement), a beacon-chain-countable set we have corroborated but not yet exhaustively pinned. Held in tokens, the total came to roughly two and a half times GLM's market cap on an August 2026 read, so the treasury comfortably exceeds it, though it is treasury funding rather than protocol income. Score held at 5/25: zero protocol revenue remains dominant. **Liquidity & Access: 11/15.** Listed on 44 venues on CoinGecko's 13 October 2026 read, including Binance, Coinbase, OKX, KuCoin, and Upbit. Excellent coverage, and broad enough that no venue holds more than about a fifth of the flow. Turnover between 1% and 2% of market cap is adequate rather than deep, and the six tier-1 names carried under a quarter of 24-hour volume on that read, with Upbit leading and LATOKEN close behind. Available on Uniswap for decentralised access. Polygon bridge available. ### Quadrant: B (High Freedom, Low Returns) Golem sits firmly in Quadrant B: one of the strongest sovereignty plays in decentralised compute with demonstrable permissionless infrastructure and an exemplary token distribution, but fundamentally weak value capture that limits investment returns. ### Key risks - **Zero protocol revenue.** 0% commission means the protocol captures no value from ten years of network usage. Structurally unsustainable without treasury subsidies. - **Token velocity problem.** No staking, no burn, no lock-up incentives. GLM earned by providers is sold immediately, creating persistent sell pressure. - **Development stagnation.** Yagna core repo had commits in March 2026 and a nightly pre-release in May 2026, but overall velocity is low. Modelserve AI suspended. Blog frequency dropped to quarterly. - **Leadership fragmentation.** The 2019 split divided resources, talent, and $40M+ in treasury between Factory and Foundation. Coordination unclear. - **Competitive erosion.** Akash, Render, and io.net have all gained more traction in the AI compute narrative despite Golem's 10-year head start. - **Provider security.** A September 2026 review found a Critical task-directory escape in yagna, fixed in v0.17.10. Providers on older versions are exposed. - **Low holder count.** 21,341 holders for a 2016-vintage token suggests limited retail interest. (figures as of 2026-09-20) - **Salad dependency.** The most promising commercial development is currently only an engineering test, not a committed production deployment. - **~89% from ATH.** Token peaked at $0.86 in November 2021 (GLM era) and has been in steady decline. The Salad.com partnership is the most concrete commercial signal in years. If it converts from engineering test to production deployment, the narrative changes. Until then, Golem is a project that built the right thing at the right time and hasn't worked out how to get paid for it. In April 2026, Golem Foundation and Golem Factory jointly pledged roughly 1,000 ETH (approximately $2.3M at the time) to the Kelp DAO Aave rescue, a coordinated DeFi response to a bridge exploit. This is a notable data point: the combined entities have meaningful treasury depth and are willing to deploy capital for ecosystem-level purposes outside their own product roadmap. **My position.** I hold GLM, staked to a router operator. The sovereignty thesis is the draw: permissionless infrastructure, GPL-3.0 licensed code, one of the fairest token distributions in crypto history. The returns case is weak by design, because Golem charges zero commission. I'm not holding it for yield. I'm holding it because the Salad.com partnership is the first real commercial signal in years and I want exposure if it converts to production. Zero protocol revenue remains the defining problem. ## Score change log | Date | Score | Change | Reason | | - | - | - | - | | 2026-10-13 | Data | N/A | Venue count restated from 48 (6 September) to 44 on CoinGecko's 13 October read; Upbit now leads volume, with tier-1 venues still under a quarter of it. Scores unchanged. | | 2026-10-07 | Data | N/A | Turnover restated from near 2% to between 1% and 2% of market cap (7-day median 1.3%, early October). Scores unchanged. | | 2026-10-04 | Data | N/A | Audit attribution corrected: OpenZeppelin audited the original GNT in 2016; GLM and the migration contract were audited by Trail of Bits and CertiK in Nov 2020. Scores unchanged. | | 2026-10-04 | Data | N/A | Added Golem's 23 Sep 2026 security review: 36 confirmed issues including 1 Critical in yagna, fixed in v0.17.10, with no evidence of exploitation found by Sherlock. Scores unchanged. | | 2026-09-24 | Data | N/A | Holder count bound to the live index (was 19,813), venues 44 to 48, yagna contributors softened to a few dozen after the repo was re-created in July 2026, and development recency moved to September 2026. Scores unchanged. | | 2026-09-23 | Data | N/A | Integrity records re-cut: 2 claims now quote Golem's own pages verbatim and 4 are our own measurements. Scores unchanged. | | 2026-09-07 | Data | N/A | WS3b censorship rail: GLM answers no owner() at all, with no pause, no proxy and no public freeze getter. One of the few clean control surfaces in the corpus. Censorship Resistance 11/15 held, supported. | | 2026-09-06 | Data | N/A | WS3b liquidity rail: the mid-single-digit-millions volume figure overstated (reported 24h volume is low single-digit millions) and should not have been an absolute figure in the first place; restated as turnover near 2%. Venue count corrected 44 to 48; all six named venues confirm. Liquidity & Access 11/15 held. | | 2026-08-19 | Data | N/A | Correction. The Liquidity evidence carried a hardcoded market cap and a dollar volume band, both of which drift. Restated structurally; no score change. | | 2026-08-17 | Data | N/A | Correction. The treasury's dollar figures (~$23M liquid, ~$160M staked, ~$180M total, 1.85x mcap) were frozen at June prices and undated in frontmatter. The holding is in tokens; re-read 17 Aug it is ~$215M against ~$88M mcap, about 2.4x. Restated around the token quantities with the multiple as a dated reading. No score change. | | 2026-08-13 | Data | N/A | Verified the supply cap on-chain: GLM 796,565,516.94 plus legacy GNT 203,434,483.06 sums to exactly 1,000,000,000, so the migration is supply-conserving rather than issuance. Migrated Golem onto the verdict spine. | | 2026-08-13 | Data | N/A | Open-source check holds (274 repos, core ya-\* components pushed within days, GPL-3.0), but github.com/golemfactory/yagna, the node repo Golem's own install docs link to, now 404s. Our refresh config pointed at the same dead repo and now tracks ya-relay. | | 2026-06-26 | Data | N/A | DefiLlama LlamaAI harvest cross-check, verified independently (CoinGecko + api.llama.fi). The snapshot cited ownyourmind.ai for the 0%-commission and treasury-opacity points; both hold (0% commission documented; treasury verified in the 25-June pass). Refreshed two figures that drifted as the token fell: the ATH decline to ~89% from the GLM-era $0.86 high (was ~~84%; verified -89% at $0.0917), with a note that CoinGecko's recorded ATH is the GNT-era $1.32 from 2018 (~~-93%); and market cap to ~$92M (was $133M). Treasury-exceeds-market-cap conclusion still holds (liquid ~$23M plus ~100k ETH Octant stake vs ~$92M mcap). 100% circulating, FDV equal to market cap, zero protocol revenue all unchanged. No score change. | | 2026-06-25 | Data | N/A | Treasury integrity check (on-chain), settled after three passes. VERIFIED directly via Ethereum RPC: ~~11,300 ETH across Foundation wallets (0x7da82c… 9,534 + 0x70a0a7be… 1,761) + 50,001,000 GLM (~~$23M); wired as an auto-refreshing data_source (treasury_eth_liquid). The larger 100,000 ETH is the Foundation's OCTANT public-goods staking: per the Dec-2023 announcement, 3,125 solo validators on Nimbus, a public top-20 pool, so a beacon-chain-countable set, strongly corroborated (announcement + rewards wallet 0xba1951 accruing ETH), with the exact validator set not yet pinned by us. The full ~$180M / treasury > market cap holds. Process note: this flip-flopped before settling: first implied the whole $180M was on-chain-verified (overstated), then wrongly called the 100k unverifiable third-party Diva DVT (the Diva move was only planned); the accurate read is solo-validator Octant staking, public and beacon-verifiable. Score held at 5/25 (zero protocol revenue dominant). | | 2026-05-03 | Editorial | N/A | Development status correction (article incorrectly claimed no commits since October 2025; GitHub shows March 2026 VPN integration merges and a 2 May 2026 nightly pre-release). Added Kelp DAO/Aave rescue pledge (~1,000 ETH, ~$2.3M, April 2026) to Honest Assessment. Initial publish row Freedom figure reconciled (was 70, should have read 69 per frontmatter). | | 2026-03-24 | Data | N/A | yagna contributors 76 → 49. Verified against GitHub. | | 2025-03-06 | Both | N/A | Initial publish. Freedom 69/100, Returns 46/100. |