Golem Arrives: One of Ethereum's Most Ambitious Apps Is Finally Live

That's the promise of Golem, a peer-to-peer market for putting your computer's excess CPU power to use for other people.

The project, which sold out of its GNT token in 20 minutes, raising 820,000 ETH - around $340 million, according to current metrics - in 2016 by selling its crypto utility tokens to investors will likely see a significant amount of fanfare since Golem was one of the earliest generations of ethereum applications.

"This is typical for software development in general, and blockchain in particular, we underestimate the complexity of what we want to do," Julian Zawistowski, CEO and founder of Golem, told CoinDesk.

This current release, Golem Brass Beta, is an effort to test whether the technology functions in real market conditions with real money.

Golem today works through a software client, which connects the two parties in Golem's network - "Providers," those that sell computational resources, and "Requestors," those that want to rent CPU power.

While it's not built on a blockchain itself, Golem uses ethereum not only for its token, GNT, and for consensus on GNT transactions.

"You start with a very simple Golem that should work up to a point where we have the Golem which is perfect and self-contained and modular, and you give it a computation and it's done in a matter of seconds," Janiuk said.

"We definitely need to move in the direction of machine learning. This is something that is suited to Golem pretty well," Janiuk said.

What the team behind Golem found was that their aim of splitting computational tasks up into smaller tasks and then reintegrated them was an uphill battle.

As witnessed during CryptoKitties' peak hype, this isn't limited to Golem, but something that extends across the industry.