Julian Zawistowki is the Founder and CEO of Golem, a global, open sourced, decentralized supercomputer that anyone can access. It will be made up of the combined power of user’s machines, from personal laptops to entire datacenters. The Golem Network is a decentralized sharing economy of computing power, where anyone can make money ‘renting’ out their computing power or developing and selling software.

Hi Julian, thanks for chatting with us! Could you tell us a bit about yourself, and about how Golem got started?

I’m originally an economist by trade, and entered the blockchain space quite late in 2013. We came across Ethereum in late 2013, which was in its infancy at the time, of course. As a result, we became involved in the development of Ethereum. I’ve been a long term fan of decentralized systems, both in computing and in other areas. Once we digested what Ethereum is, we came to the conclusion that we could build something like Golem on top of Ethereum.

The idea for Golem had actually been with us since February 2014 and was first presented during DevCon in November 2014. Development on Golem started in 2014, and in 2015 we really started to ramp up. We had more runway and resources then and being focused became very important. After DevCon1, we thought it was reasonable to develop Golem further, after seeing Ethereum become more mature.

What do you think about the current situation of the blockchain space?

Well, the recent growth in many coins prices is of course very nice but it is a double edged sword. The fact that this technology has coins gives us a great opportunity to finance development and that’s great, but that also distracts some people from the core thing, which is technology, and not speculation. I believe Ethereum is an incredibly promising technology, with a lot of potential, but still in development. Therefore I believe we should — as an industry — focus on development of technology and not get too excited about markets. I very like the policy of not having any trading discussions on the Ethereum sub-reddit.

How will Golem be more versatile than a distributed computer like FoldingCoin or similar projects?

One important difference is that unlike FoldingCoin, we do not generate coins in the process of computing. In a traditional proof of work system, you get coins that are magically created as a reward for solving a hash puzzle. We aren’t creating new coins for doing the work, we just facilitate contracts between requestors, someone who needs a job done, and providers, someone who has a computer to do the computing, and it’s a simple transaction between them. And that’s it — and I think that gives great flexibility. It means every requestor is fueling the network with tokens, and the provider can eventually sell the tokens, which is an economy that can work. If you generate tokens for solving something, like in traditional proof of work, it can be very cool, but there’s no reason for that token to have any intrinsic value. Bitcoin has intrinsic value only because people believe it has value. With Ethereum, it has intrinsic value when it’s used as gas. In our case, we have abstracted the token itself from the part of doing work, and what’s left is the protocol, which is our token, and which draws economic interactions between the nodes. That’s important to understanding why we’re different from other systems.

I’m curious how you came up with the name for the Golem stages — is it inspired by the Blizzard video game Diablo?

Originally, we got the name Golem from science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem’s novel Golem XIV, about a military supercomputer that achieved singularity and became like a super artificial intelligence. I believe the writer named the supercomputer Golem after the Jewish myth of the artificial creation resembling man. That book is the reason we named our project Golem.

How do you think people working with blockchain can drive greater acceptance of cryptocurrencies among the “general public”, people who aren’t intimately familiar with blockchain technology?

I think the key is to focus on properties of the blockchain. The blockchain comes with certain features that are good, and certain features that are not that good. For example, losing your private key is not that good. For greater adoption we have to take full advantage of good features and find ways to minimize hurdles, immersing technology in great UX. I believe once we have great UX and people learn about the properties of blockchain technology, then adoption will happen, because blockchain can create systems that are simply better than what we have at the moment.

I think financial institutions will use blockchain, but I don’t think that’s where the most important things will happen from the perspective of public chains. If they do something blockchain related, it will be closed technology, run by a tight circle of institutions working together. Still, for identity management, contracts, any situation in which people interact with each other and many more, you can use smart contracts and decentralized systems and you can and should use blockchain technologies. The barrier to greater adoption is just in making it simpler to use, so it can be immersed into people’s lives. Right now, this is definitely something we have a problem with, as an industry.

Also, one of the problems facing every application that has its own tokens, is creating a way to simply acquire those tokens. Simply getting dApp tokens is still a pain, and we cannot expect the average user to do that. So we have to make that better. I foresee major progress in this area in the next few quarters.

What do you know about WeTrust? How did you learn about WeTrust? What excites you about the project?

I don’t know much about WeTrust, but I have seen news about you on Reddit and visited your website. I have to say, I very much like the idea, it’s very personable, and can benefit developing countries. I’m very interested in the fact that this is using high technology, aimed at the low end part of the developing market — I think that gap can be closed with this technology. At the end of the day, it seems you will be making it simpler for this community lending to happen.

Thanks for chatting with us, Julian!