Bitcoin is fulfilling it's purpose as the face of cryptocurrency. All blockchains are linked; if Bitcoin is doing well, every blockchain is doing well. Bitcoin's first-to-market advantage and brand recognition are it's strongest attributes.

However, Bitcoin has gone out of control. It has proven that the proof-of-work algorithm is sorely outdated for popular/profitable coins. POW hashing algorithms have become an embarrassing waste of energy.
One Bitcoin Transaction Now Uses as Much Energy as Your House in a Week

Projects like Golem seek to change this.

Instead of wasting all that computing power on a fancy lottery these projects want the mining process to actually accomplish something. I'm the most excited for Golem because I think they are the closest to mainstream adoption.

With the highest ranked market cap, currently sitting at #63, Golem's first move is to release Brass Golem; which will allow miners to acquire coins by rendering graphics with Blender for other users willing to pay for this service. As someone who wants to create video games for the blockchain this is exceptionally exciting. It's quite possible that I'll be using this service personally to accomplish my goals.

Business Model

It can take weeks to render graphics on a home computer. With this service it will take minutes. Not only that, everyone in the world is guaranteed a fair market price. No longer will we have to rely on centralized entities that sell this service. Currently, companies who sell graphic rendering are in the business of making money and taking you for everything they can. With Golem, the service will be provided for the price of what it's worth, instead of the maximum profitable value. This is a much more pure and ideal form of capitalism where everyone in the ecosystem can be a producer and a consumer.

For example, let's say I wanted to render some graphics and it would take my computer three weeks to do the job. Lucky for me, I've been mining Golem for the last three weeks and I have just enough coins to pay have the job done in three minutes. In effect, it's almost like I got to use Golem for free. It allowed me to take my three weeks of rendering and condense all that work into three minutes right when I needed it to, at no cost. Pretty amazing when you think about it.

Marketing and divide and conquer tactics.

Another reason why I think Golem will be the first popular POW 2.0 product is that they are taking baby steps with the technology while at the same time focusing on the market and advertising. If no one knows about Golem, no one is going to use it. If they bite off more development than they can chew, the product will be delayed for years.

Release date

Brass Golem was already supposed to be released in February. I knew the moment I read that, that it wouldn't be anywhere close to February. I don't know if you have any experience waiting for software products to come out. In my experience it's mostly video games, but they never come out on time. This is how the term Soon™ was born. By focusing on a small project first like graphics rendering, Golem will be able to release their product in a more timely manner while at the same time being able to refine their marketing and advertising strategies.

Seeing as they still haven't changed their projection of "early 2018", I'd say there is a good chance Brass Golem comes out during the summer time along with a lot of other blockchain technologies. This is great news because I've been predicting a bull run in the summer for a while now and the release of Brass Golem will only make it stronger.

Built in use-case scenario

Cryptocurrency is supposed to be money, yet there isn't much you can buy with it. With LitePay being recently declared dead this concern lingers on. When will you actually be able to buy basic goods and services with crypto? With Golem the product you're buying is built in to the service. Every time Golem adds a service, that's one more thing you can use Golem coins to buy. There is no question as to what it will/should be used for.

Simplicity

Golem is an ERC-20 Ethereum token. This lets the Golem team focus on what they need to get done and let's Ethereum do the heavy lifting when it comes to payment and scaling up.

Worst-case scenario

There's always the possibility that the Golem project will never get off the ground. You never know, maybe another development team somehow beats them to the punch, however unlikely that seems. Nevertheless, the idea of proof-of-work 2.0 will remain. In the near future we're going to turn a lot of worthless computations into something useful.

Soon™