Fueled by a native utility token HOT, Holochain develops a hosting platform that enables decentralized Holochain applications or hApps to serve mainstream internet users. Holochain focuses on delivering scalable crypto-accounting infrastructure that allows hosting and maintaining these applications.

How Holochain works

The key problem of the two most popular blockchain platforms Bitcoin and Ethereum that Holochain aims to resolve is scalability. The architecture of these two platforms allows processing a pretty small number of transactions per second which prevents them from being adopted by mass audiences.

In order to achieve scalability and process enormous numbers of users in a unit of time, Holochain replaces the global consensus with private forks that are maintained by separate agents with their own secure ledgers. These forks are stored on the public blockchain with a distributed hash table allowing all the participants of the network to function in an independent way. The data gets synchronized only when users deem that this is necessary. At the same time, participants of the network do not remain in the vacuum and can still interact with each other.

The use cases for the Holochain are aplenty. With the help of this platform, developers can create applications for collaboration and governance, social networks, sharing economy, supply chain and much more. Users of these apps will stay in control of their own data and identity.

Environmentally friendly

Another big issue associated with cryptocurrencies based on the Proof-of-Work consensus algorithm such as Bitcoin is excessive energy consumption. Holochain offers a solution to this problem, too, claiming to be a green and environmentally friendly project.

As every node on Holochain doesn’t have to store and validate the whole history of all transactions that have ever taken place, only a small percentage of bandwidth is required and much less energy is spent. No mining is needed for new nodes to be added to Holochain, and thus the electricity usage remains at the minimal level.

Decentralized apps built on Holochain

Holochain is a good option for creating dApps with the potential to handle thousands of user transactions per second. Holochain puts forward social networks as one of the top use cases for their platform on their website. Also, the following hApps can be found on the project’s GitHub:

HoloWorld: a “Hello World” example utilized as a tutorial
approvedList: an example of an app used for whitelisting
HoloDAO: a Holochain version of Decentralized Autonomous Organization that was first introduced on Ethereum
Fractal-wiki: a wikipedia-like knowledgebase built on Holochain
HoloChat: a multi-room peer-to-peer chat
Clutter: a social platform similar to Twitter

Holochain is based on the programming language Go which is pretty similar to C. This makes it much easier to learn and implement than Solidity and all other new languages invented for creating dApps.

HOT token

Holochain launched the public token sale on March 29th, 2018, and finished it on April 28th having raised about 20 million USD in Ether. During the token sale, 25 billion HOT tokens were released initially with new tokens being added to the system via minting after that. 75% of the released amount were distributed via the crowdsale and the remaining 25% were reserved by the founding team for the project’s future expenses.

HOT is available for trading on many reputable exchanges such as Binance, Coinex, and Hotbit. Since it is an ERC-20 token, it can be stored on all Ethereum-compatible wallets such as Coinomi, MyEtherWallet or Metamask.

Once the mainnet goes live, new tokens named HoloFuel will come into the light and HOT holders will be able to exchange their coins at a 1:1 ratio. HoloFuel will be used as a primary means of payment on the platform as developers who want to host their applications on Holochain will have to obtain computing resources from HoloHosts paying with the native token of the platform.

Holochain team

Holochain was co-founded in late 2016 by US-based Arthur Brock and Eric Harris-Braun, two seasoned IT specialists with many years of experience behind their shoulders.

Arthur Brock who serves as Chief Architect founded another project MetaCurrency back in 2008. This project represents a multi-currency platform with a broad range of features for different currency solutions and it served as a foundation of the Holochain project itself. Brock also has experience in developing alternative currency systems as in 2003-2007 he was involved in Targeted Currencies Network as CTO and Lead Currency Designer.

Eric Harris-Braun was also involved in the MetaCurrency Project. His experience in software development has its roots back in 1993 when he founded Glass Bead Software, a cross-platform p2p communication company that is still afloat.