Golem is an open-source supercomputer that allows users to rent out and rent IT resources. It was founded in 2016 by Golem Factory and was introduced two years later. Golem Factory was co-founded by Aleksandra Skrzypczak, Andrzej Regulski, Julian Zawistowski, and Piotr Janiuk. The idea was to create the world's most powerful decentralized P2P network and use its capabilities for cloud computing, including mining.
The Golem project was inspired by the idea that most PC owners do not use the potential of their processors at full capacity. That is true, in most cases, the CPU load is minimal. Golem offers users to lease unclaimed capacities and receive a reward in the internal cryptocurrency of the system. There are two types of users interacting with the unclaimed capacities: requestors and providers. Requestors are users who seek a specific type of IT resource, such as computation hardware and providers have the needed available resources. Requestors purchase the said resources through a decentralized market and utilize them with the help of Golem’s infrastructure. GLM, formerly known as a GNT, is an ERC-20 utility token. It is needed to access the Golem network and to rent IT resources.
In 2021, Golem released the Yagna mainnet, a new version of the Golem network. With the release, the network transitioned to the GLM token and introduced zkSync (Layer 2 payment provider) to the system to minimize transaction costs.