How Golem Network Could Transform Salad's $200M GPU Cloud Business Model
Salad.com, operating for eight years with a global network spanning Fortune 500 clients to AI startups, is about to find out. The company announced a partnership with Golem Network, designed to test whether decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN) can handle the operational complexity of established cloud businesses.
\ This partnership represents something different from typical blockchain announcements. Rather than launching a token or rebranding existing services, Salad.com plans to mirror actual commercial activity through Golem's permissionless execution layer. The test will process real customer workloads, from AI inference to 3D rendering, while evaluating whether Web3 infrastructure can deliver the efficiency gains needed to justify migration from traditional payment processors and billing platforms.
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What Salad's Operational Challenges Reveal About Web2 Cloud Limitations
Salad operates a globally distributed GPU cloud platform where both datacenters and individuals contribute idle computational resources in exchange for rewards. This model creates operational complexity that traditional infrastructure struggles to address efficiently. The company currently relies on centralized payment processors, usage-based billing platforms, and multiple reward suppliers to facilitate transactions between customers and infrastructure providers across different jurisdictions.
\ Bob Miles, CEO of Salad.com, explains,
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\ The cost structure of managing global payments represents a significant margin pressure point. Payment processors charge fees for cross-border transactions, currency conversions add additional costs, and maintaining compliance across multiple jurisdictions requires dedicated legal and operational resources. For a platform processing thousands of customer workloads daily, these inefficiencies compound quickly. Crypto payments and decentralized settlement could eliminate intermediaries, but only if the underlying infrastructure can match the reliability customers expect from traditional cloud providers.
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How Golem Network's Architecture Maps to Salad's Existing Platform
Golem Network launched as one of the first decentralized computing protocols, creating a marketplace where users can allocate computational resources or access them in exchange for GLM tokens. The architecture connecting compute requestors and providers through a decentralized protocol mirrors how Salad's platform already operates, which explains why the company selected Golem after evaluating various DePIN protocols starting in Q3 2025.
\ Kyle Dodson, Salad's CTO, explains,
\ The initial test phase will mirror a portion of Salad's existing commercial activity across the full range of cloud computing products and services the company offers. This includes workloads for in silico drug discovery simulations, AI inference operations, and 3D rendering tasks. The goal is verifying whether Golem's infrastructure can support the breadth of customer and workload profiles currently utilizing Salad's cloud infrastructure without performance degradation or reliability issues.
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What This Test Means for Web2-Web3 Infrastructure Integration
The partnership addresses a question that extends beyond Salad's specific use case. Can traditional businesses integrate with permissionless protocols while maintaining the operational efficiency and user experience that customers expect? Most DePIN projects focus on building new networks from scratch. Salad's approach tests whether existing Web2 businesses with established customer bases and revenue streams can successfully transition computational workloads to decentralized infrastructure.
\ The experiment will evaluate core protocol components including the decentralized marketplace and settlement infrastructure. For Salad, success means demonstrating that crypto payments and permissionless compute execution can reduce operational overhead while maintaining service quality. The company specifically wants to understand how its margin profile fits into a sustainable tokenomics model as it scales mirrored traffic through Golem Network.
\ For Golem, the partnership provides real-world validation of protocol capabilities under production conditions. Working with a platform processing thousands of customer workloads offers insights that internal testing cannot replicate. The collaboration also helps Golem refine its SDK and strengthen support for future integrations with other Web2 platforms exploring similar transitions.
\ The broader implication concerns resource sharing across currently siloed networks. Cloud computing markets remain fragmented between hyperscale providers like AWS and Azure, specialized GPU clouds, and emerging decentralized networks. Successful integration between Web2 and Web3 marketplaces could enable participants to access complementary capabilities, potentially creating more efficient resource allocation across the entire computational infrastructure ecosystem.
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Final Thoughts
This partnership matters because it tests assumptions about decentralized infrastructure under real commercial conditions rather than controlled experiments or theoretical models. Salad brings eight years of operational experience, thousands of existing customers, and production workloads that cannot tolerate downtime or performance issues. Golem provides permissionless infrastructure that could eliminate payment intermediaries and reduce operational complexity.
\ The outcome will provide data that extends beyond either company. If decentralized protocols can support established Web2 cloud businesses without sacrificing efficiency, that opens migration paths for other platforms facing similar operational challenges. If the test reveals fundamental limitations in current DePIN infrastructure, that information helps the industry understand what needs improvement before widespread Web2-Web3 integration becomes viable.
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