Golem fell more than most tokens and digital currencies today, down 7%, following what appears to be perceived delays in the delivery of their alpha product called Brass.
Apparently, rumors had been circulating suggesting Brass would be out this month, but that now seems unlikely as the project may be facing some delays.
Because a user noted the project code may have some errors or bugs preventing it from compiling properly as what is called a “build,” which translates the program from lower level language to more human friendly language, was failing.
That suggests Golem has a lot more work to do, as well as a lot more testing and refining of the product, before Brass can be launched, with time estimates now seemingly moving to another few more months.
The start-up has been working on Golem for quite some time with the aim of building a very complex supercomputer of sorts that combines into one package distributed CPU resources and other aspects, such as memory, allowing whoever needs it to access the decentralized supercomputer.
Their main target seems to be individuals who require huge resources to render images or movies (such as the headline image pictured above), with scientists and others potentially benefiting, so raising nearly a million eth towards that goal back in November 2016, worth at the time around $9 million.
That makes Golem one of the first start-ups to offer an ICO token sale during slightly more difficult times last autumn when eth was going through a very cold winter.
In the circumstances, it’s not clear whether they kept any of their eth. Their smart contract address shows zero. A very brief analysis showed the last 1,000 eth was withdrawn to Poloniex more than a month ago.
We tried to speak with Michal Brazewicz from the Golem project who was online at the time, but left without answering our questions.
We were interested to hear their response regarding delays, but also, more crucially, we were interested to know whether the project has any money left.
Because it is not very clear they employed good money management strategies during what, admittedly, was a very difficult period for the entire ecosystem.
Failing a response, we just don’t know, which shows this space needs to mature significantly. Projects must provide quarterly reports of their holdings, spendings, their progress, and all other relevant aspects.
Preferably audited, because investors need some method of keeping them to account, some method of having an input – even if that is by public pressure – some method of agreeing or disagreeing with the direction and some method of providing feedback.
As it stands, everyone is lost as Golem’s website has probably not been updated with any relevant information since their pre-ICO set up many months ago.
So we are left guessing basic facts, leaving any current potential investor fully in the dark about anything whatever, leaving the project itself with no feedback mechanism, and leaving investors without the option of potentially righting what could be, or may have been, misguided decisions.
It may certainly be the case at the time they were the best decisions that could be made, if any such decision was indeed made, but without any documentation, without any public investors input, we have no idea whatever whether that is indeed the case or otherwise.
Update: The Golem MultiSig smart contract address shows the project has nearly 400,000 eth, currently worth around $100 million.
Update2: Michal Brazewicz later responded to say that he is only a slack moderator, not Communication Officer. He had so many Direct Messages regarding phishing attempts, so that was easy to miss ours. He further said that he is not the official Golem representative for communication with media.
