Golem has had a number of significant milestones this year, like being included in The World Bank and Future Today Institute’s 2021 Tech Trend Report – a stepping stone for Golem, for the community and for decentralized web projects everywhere. They started the year with Golem’s first Hackathon, which resulted in them finding one of their now very treasured developer’s, the Software Ninja, Paweł Burgchardt who created ChessOnGolem used in their 30k GLM Golem Chess Competition. Later they had the Golem GR9 and Golem Online Hackathon.

The mainnet launch for the Golem (Yagna) was launched on March 11th in the form of the Beta I. This new implementation was built from the ground up to be modular, lightweight and easier to build on with the Golem APIs (e.g. the Yagna Python API / Yapapi). This all combined with their Handbook forms the SDK for Yagna. Here’s a visualization of the Golem Network ecosystem development.

Early on Golem ran a Meme Contest which was super fun, they collected many of the amazing memes throughout the year and submissions to the contest and threw them in a dropbox for everyone to use! Around the same time, they participated in and created a workshop for the Hello Decentralization’s online event. And 0xHack shortly there after, with Maria Paula holding a talk and Kuba’s workshop for developers.

Their star tech supporter Phillip showed some new skills, creating the Golem Stats page with the help of community collaboration+input for which we created a timeline.

Later in 2021, they celebrated the Golem 5 Year anniversary with an awesome online community meet-up and gave some love via POAP NFTs. During the year they gave out over 48,000 GLM and 83,180 USDC for hackathons and bounties, along with other milestones that they were excited to celebrate:

The GLM Rewards Program was no small addition on-top of the bounties, giving 220,000 GLM to in community rewards for the year, giving the program more than 335k GLM rewarded to the community across its lifespan so far.

Polygon collaboration announcement led to the implementation of Polygon payments first on Thorg and later on the Golem Network with the release of the Beta IV, the fourth major beta release of Yagna for the year. Since then there have been >350k GLM transfers on Polygon.

Thorg came in with a bang and he’s just getting started. He’s the first implementation of GPU mining (ETH and ETC) with layer 2 GLM payouts. He’s also gearing up to run CPU / Yagna tasks on Windows.

And then there’s the science, they’re discovering the origins of life with the support of Allchemy. They have an ongoing Twitter thread created by the LIFE@Golem team to give more insight into what they’re working on.

The on-stop-shop for Golem; Awesome Golem was listed the overall Awesome list page, the 7th most starred GitHub repository with 181,217 stars.

There are so many more small and large achievements that they’d love to highlight, such as watching the community grow and assisting one another. The Golem Discord averages hundreds of messages on a daily basis and each individual’s involvement is so valuable and great to see. They’ve watched individuals with a variety of skills come together to put it into a harmony of collaboration that they couldn’t begin to highlight any particular person on their own.

Lots to do, 2022!

They’re excited for what 2022 will bring to the project and look forward to getting more involved with the community and other projects while building Golem in parallel. Thanks for reading our summary of 2021! They’ll be coming out with an update on plans they have for 2022 in the coming week.