Using Golem on Mainnet

If you are a requestor:

• You need to configure your requestor agent to negotiate Polygon or Ethereum as a payment platform. You can find a JS example here.
• Next, you need to enable payments on the platform you choose (Polygon on Ethereum).

Okay, so while technically we now know how to hand out tasks to providers on paid networks, in the context of running Golem on the mainnet, a few important questions remain largely unanswered:

• How to choose a payment platform - Ethereum vs Layer-2
• How to monitor the status of your wallet
• How to secure access to the funds in your Golem wallet if things go haywire?
• How do you get funds to your requestor so you can use them to pay for the tasks?
• How do you get funds out of a Golem node if you don't need them there anymore?

The most important decision you need to make when it comes to Golem payments (both between Requestors <-> Providers, as well as getting funds in and out of Golem Network) is whether to use Ethereum or its Layer-2 scaling sidechain: Polygon.

While direct, on-chain transactions using ERC-20-based tokens have long become the daily bread for the Ethereum mainnet and constitute a significant part of more than a million transactions passing through the chain each day, current ETH's price and the average gas fees make it extremely hard to use as a mean of exchange. This is because Golem payments will usually be orders of magnitude smaller than the typical transaction fee on Ethereum.

Of course, if you're willing to accept that disproportion, you may continue to use the Ethereum mainnet payments but for the majority of Golem users, Polygon will be the preferred platform both when paying for tasks and receiving payments for their execution.

For more information regarding Layer 2 and Polygon, please refer to our introduction to Layer 2 payments:

There are a number of yagna commands that will enable you to monitor the status of your wallet. They will let you check the address of the wallet, check the status, and enable payments from it. Their usage is illustrated here

Golem provides a procedure to backup your wallet in a secure way, as well as to restore it to the new Yagna installation. Please follow the instructions provided in Golem wallet backup and Restore Golem wallet tutorials.

Golem Network payments are done on Blockchain with GLM tokens. Consequently, to enable such payments you will need:

• GLM tokens to pay the Provider
• Native token of the chosen Blockchain to pay for the gas a.k.a. transaction fees

Ethereum native token is ETH, whereas Polygon Network has MATIC.

You can top up your wallet with the following command:

yagna payment fund

1. Find an exchange platform that enables you to buy MATIC for FIAT i.e. Ramp
2. Buy MATICs on Polygon
3. Swap some of MATICs to GLMs on quickswap or uniswap

Go to Polygon Website

1. Select Proof of Stake and then Native Bridge (in the Wallet Features section)
2. Connect your wallet
3. Choose the token you want to get and follow the instructions

Go to Polygon Website

1. Select Proof of Stake and then Swap (in the Wallet Features section)
2. Connect your wallet
3. Choose the token you want to get and follow the instructions

You can consider one of the following options:

• swapping GLM tokens to MATIC and selling them directly on a trading platform or
• bridging them to Ethereum Mainnet