Golem

Golem's November 2016 crowdfunding created 1 billion GNT and reached its 820,000 ETH cap in 29 minutes. The first production chapter was Brass, a rendering-focused mainnet beta launched in April 2018. Its ambition was broad, but its interfaces and execution model carried assumptions that the team later chose to replace rather than merely polish.

In 2019 the organization also split. Piotr Janiuk and Aleksandra Skrzypczak took responsibility for Golem Factory and the core compute platform; Julian Zawistowski and Andrzej Regulski led the newly created Golem Foundation. The Foundation received part of the original capital to explore other ecosystem uses. That institutional history matters because neither body is simply an on-chain department controlled by every token balance.

GNT launched before ERC-20 became the common interface. Yagna's Ethereum Layer-2 payment plan required an ERC-20 token, so the team deployed GLM and opened migration on November 19, 2020. The door is one-way, 1:1 and has no deadline.

The contracts implement conservation rather than a fresh billion-token issuance. Legacy GNT subtracts the migrated balance and total supply, then calls agent 0xbfad98d76598961827ba832108c21445aa4fee9a. That agent mints exactly the same amount at the GLM contract. At review, the balances were about 796.57 million GLM and 203.43 million GNT, while their token amounts, expressed with the full 18-decimal precision, summed exactly to 1 billion. Calling all 1 billion 'GLM supply' hides the unfinished conversion.

Control is unusually narrow at this layer. GLM is non-proxy code with no pause, freeze or blacklist. Its migration agent is the effective minter, but only the old GNT contract may invoke migration; the agent's owner is the zero address and its target already points to GLM. New GLM therefore follows destroyed GNT rather than an operator emissions schedule.

The March 11, 2021 Yagna Beta I mainnet release replaced the old product line with a modular reference implementation. Provider and requestor run the same base service. Providers advertise Offers; requestors publish Demands with resource, runtime and payment constraints. Compatible proposals become a mutually confirmed Agreement, and an Activity becomes the actual VM or service instance on provider hardware.

Billing follows measured use. A provider can send keep-alive debit notes and later a final invoice; the requestor accepts the bill and its payment driver submits or batches GLM transfers. Polygon is preferred because small payments would be uneconomic on Ethereum mainnet, although Ethereum remains available. This sequence corrects a tempting shortcut: there is no universal smart contract that inspects every output and releases a guaranteed reward. Work, billing, acceptance and on-chain settlement are distinct steps.

Providers set their resources and prices, requestors choose criteria and can work with several machines. Yet access can travel through relays, client software is maintained in Golem Factory repositories, and the official reputation API is a curated service. Its success rate covers tasks run by that system, not all requestors, and it excludes some providers. A requestor must deliberately use its returned IDs or SDK helper.

GLM's core role is transfer and payment. A provider earns because an Agreement and invoice exist, not because it holds tokens. The official 2016 GNT creation terms denied ownership, revenue share, post-activation refund and governance influence; they are a historical predecessor baseline, not a newly signed GLM charter. Current platform terms say Swiss Golem Factory GmbH is not party to requestor-provider contracts and create no claims against it. Golem Foundation's Octant separately adds voting and ETH rewards when GLM is locked under Octant rules; that does not govern Yagna.