Golem and Render are two prominent projects in the realm of decentralized computing that are making some serious moves this year. These projects, however, are not exactly the same — whether it’s their different approaches to decentralized computing or their respective tokens’ vastly different trajectories.
So, let’s look at how these two projects are performing and how they compare to each other!
Golem Network Vs. Render Network
Launched in 2018, two years after its whitepaper was released, the Golem project was co-founded by its lead software engineer, Aleksandra Skrypczak, and its CTO, Piotr Janiuk.
It is a peer-to-peer network that provides a global, distributed market of central processor unit (CPU) power. The platform allows everyone to contribute by leasing their extra CPU power in exchange for a reward from customers who create products that require large energy sources. This way, users can create, compute, and earn by building software solutions by accessing computing resources across the platform.
Overall, the network provides reliable and censorship-resistant access to digital resources and connects users through an open-source, flexible, and programmable platform. By building its settlement layer on top of Ethereum’s Layer 2, Golem also allows for cheaper transactions.
Now, when it comes to the Render Network, it is a protocol that enables distributed graphics processing. The protocol connects users looking to render images and video with those who have idle graphics processing power.
It was co-founded in 2016 by Jules Urbach, who is also the CEO of cloud rendering company OTOY, Ari Emanuel, and J.J. Abrams, the chairman and CEO of Bad Robot Productions.
To democratize GPU cloud rendering, the project has built an efficient, scalable, and robust rendering network. It further seeks to connect users to perform render jobs with people who have idle GPUs, as such, requiring owners to connect their GPU to the Render Network for receiving and completing rendering jobs.
Render Network aspires to include crowdsourced 3D projects for digital rights management, which can create a vibrant marketplace for not just digital assets but also ideas and apps that anyone can leverage and access.
GLM & RNDR Tokens’ Performance
GLM is the native token of Golem used to pay for resources and receive payment via the protocol. Its token sale was a successful one, with the team gathering 820,000 ETH in a matter of 20 minutes.
With a market cap of $232.45 million, GLM is currently the 144th largest cryptocurrency at the time of writing, which has been trading at $0.2323. In the last 24 hours, the price of GLM has fallen 2% while managing $94.66 million in volume, a decrease of 45.20% from a day ago.
The token, which has a total supply of 1 billion, is up 12% in the past week and 22% in the past 30 days. GLM’s price is also up about 30% in 2023, so far, while being down by 13.4% over the past year.
Click here to learn all about investing in Golem (GLM).
In comparison, RNDR is the 69th largest cryptocurrency with a market cap of $632.69 million, and it is currently trading at $1.71, up 0.7% in the past 24 hours while managing $31.6 million in volume, which is an increase of 24.80% from a day ago.
RNDR powers the Render Network and is used as the medium of exchange. By registering workstations on the network, users can earn RNDR tokens for completing their jobs, which can then later be spent to fund rendering projects. This way, RNDR aims to provide content creators with rights protection, monetization, and control. Besides RNDR, Render Network also has RNDR Credits, a user-friendly mechanism to buy rendering power on the network using PayPal or Stripe.
The token has a total supply of 531 million and is down by 2.3% in the past week and 13% in the past month. However, RNDR’s price is up over 300% year-to-date (YTD) as well as 124.5% over the past year.
The value of GLM has risen 40% since the mid-June low versus RNDR’s nearly 20% drop during the same period.
GLM hit its all-time high (ATH) at $1.32 in 2018 and is currently down 82.5% since then. Meanwhile, its all-time low (ATL) was at $0.00913 in Dec. 2016. RNDR, on the other hand, is currently 80.53% off its peak of $8.78 hit in Nov. 2021, along with the broad crypto market, while its ATL was at $0.03665 in June 2020.
Now, a lot is happening in the ecosystems of both networks, so let’s take a look at how 2023 is shaping out to be for Golem and Render.
Click here to learn all about investing in Render Network (RNDR).
Developments within the Golem Ecosystem
When looking at Golem, this year has been filled with several updates. Just last month, the project announced Jupyter on Golem for programming enthusiasts. Jupyter is an open-source tool that provides an interactive computing environment for creating and sharing documents. And through Jupyter on Golem, it enabled the execution of Python Notebooks using the resources available on the Golem Network. This gave users the benefit of leveraging decentralized computing resources to speed up computations without investing in expensive hardware or renting expensive cloud services.
Around the same time, the Golem team introduced changes to its dapp-runner and dapp-manager. The GAOM (Golem Application Object Model) API is a major enhancement in this update. It enables external applications to access the internal status of dapp-runner and its associated app. This provides developers in-depth data regarding networks, payloads, and service instances. With these upgrades, Golem brought significant changes to make the development of dApps even more accessible and efficient.
A new service was also added to the Golem Portal last month. With Cache on Golem, the team brought cache databases to the forefront of its network. It is a Proof-of-Concept (PoC) accessible via MetaMask wallet and can be used as a free-tier service. This service scales user database traffic seamlessly to meet growing demands, reduces infrastructure costs to zero, and improves response times and user experiences.
The Golem Portal itself was launched in April after being in development for months, with which the project aims to lower the barrier to entry for developers to run apps on the network as well as to improve its adoption and attract more users. It is like an additional abstraction layer over the API and SDK with deployment visualization added to help in the development process. At the time, the team said they were also planning to grow an additional layer of Services on Golem Portal, such as Stable Diffusion.
Just a couple of months before that, Golem Network used Stable Diffusion to introduce a GPU computing proof of concept. It is a text-to-image generator inspired by the AI-based Stable Diffusion model with the decentralized Golem Network platform as a backend, showcasing its GPU computing possibilities.
Early in July, Golem Network also unveiled two major updates; the Golem Blockchain Gateway and a Blender-based service as part of its partnership with Reality NFT. Golem first announced its partnership with the project in April this year. Reality NFT is a platform that enables users to buy, sell, and create NFTs based on real-world assets, and this collaboration allows the platform to access blockchain in a decentralized manner. For this, the Golem Network also created a liquidity pool for the trading pair GLM/RLTM that is available for DEX trading and ensures better access to GLM for the RLTM ecosystem.
Through its new Golem Blockchain Gateway solution, the project enables the Reality NFT project to connect to the Ethereum network without needing it to maintain nodes itself. Also, by leveraging the rendering tool Blender, Golem allows users to create and customize their own animations. It further provided computational offloading so users don’t have to own powerful hardware to render their videos.
This was all just last month, though, this year, one of the biggest developments has been the launch of the highly anticipated patch release of Golem’s version 0.12.1. Besides resolving significant bug fixes that have been impacting both external and internal users, it also implemented key improvements to provide users with smoother operations, improved performance, and seamless experience.
On another note, according to DeFi Llama, the protocol has $324.38 million in its Treasury, nearly 95% of which is in WETH, with its own GLM token accounting for about 5%.
Click here to learn all about buying Golem (GLM).
Developments within the Render Ecosystem
Much like Golem, Render had a busy 2023. Right at the beginning of the year, it announced a new not-for-profit, The Render Network Foundation, to maintain the core protocol and grow its community and ecosystem. The project was initially financed by one of its early corporate contributors OTOY Inc., which has now transferred the control of the core network repos and the brand to the Foundation. This has been regarded as a major step in decentralization and putting the protocol’s governance and control in the hands of the community.
The Foundation’s core role is facilitating the Render Network Proposal (RNP) system and will also be responsible for helping to set the strategic priorities of the network and issuing grants to support them.
According to the project’s 2Q23 report, the last quarter recorded continued usage of the network against the backdrop of turbulence in the macroeconomic environment and the crypto and NFT space.
The network recorded a 10% increase in frames rendered, jobs processed, and RNDR used in Q2, while node utilization and Octane Bench power on the network spiked by about 25% showing greater performance and distribution. On the Node Operator front, Q2 saw growth between 10% to 20% across all major categories. Active nodes participating on the network were 1,140 this quarter versus 903 in Q1.
Among these active notes, the total amount of OB of these active nodes also increased to 1.538 million, which provided creators with more raw rendering power. While OB processed and jobs increased, render times on the protocol decreased, which shows that the network is getting more powerful and efficient.
A total of 48,850 Render Network Jobs were created through the second quarter, which is a slight increase from nearly 46k in the previous quarter. When it comes to total frames rendered, they also saw a slight increase from almost 2.12 million to just over 2.48 million.
During this quarter, the Render Network Foundation also took a major step toward its goal of expanding the ecosystem through the “Request for Compute” survey and the Render Network Foundation Grant cohort. On the technical level, the network released its Stable Diffusion, which allows users to enter text prompts and generate images rendered across Render Network nodes directly within the Render Network UI.
The quarter also saw the Roddenberry Archive releasing an immersive experience that included behind-the-scenes draft materials, a linked short film, as well as archival material related to the show and production stored on-chain, rendered entirely on the Render Network.
Just last week, the Render community successfully passed RNP-004, which proposes the introduction of an API to the network that would allow for the nodes to be utilized for open compute operations. It would be an opt-in feature for Node Operators that will provide them with an alternative way to earn besides the main rendering service, where they provide rendering power for creators on the network. The nodes, under the new proposal, would be utilized in different ways, including for AI model training and large language models.
This new RNP is hailed as a game-changer for the Render Network by greatly expanding its user base and use cases which will push it into the expanding market of AI and machine learning tools.
Last quarter, the community passed RNP-002 for transition to Solana as the L1 for the Network and RNP-003, which proposed obtaining resources through emissions to support the team and fund grants.
Over the last several years, Render Network users have rendered a total of more than 16 million frames and about half a million scenes on the network. This has helped the project evolve into one of the world’s largest decentralized GPU computing and GPU cloud rendering networks.
Today, organizations such as Swatchbook and MR Studios, along with many top 3D crypto artists, have become part of the Render Network community. The network now supports a wide range of applications, including large-scale rendering workflows, immersive virtual worlds, GPU-driven product design, and NFT production.
Click here to learn all about buying Render Network (RNDR).
Conclusion
So, as we saw, both projects are working on expanding their utility and the ecosystem. The tokens do continue to see subdued price action, though it is in line with the broad crypto market, which is still recovering from the bear market of 2022.
Meanwhile, with their continuous developments, Golem aims to become a building block for future Internet service providers, while Render Network is building itself to be a pillar of the future of entertainment across the next generation of media.
The post Decoding Decentralized Computing Giants: Golem (GLM) vs. Render (RNDR) appeared first on Securities.io.
