Holochain

= "a non-blockchain architecture for distributed social applications (dApps or hApps) and the ground level for further expanding an evolvable, fully distributed framework for coordinated sense-making and collective value-creation (i.e., means of articulating value) on all scales". "Holographic Storage for Distributed Applications".

URL: http://ceptr.org/projects/holochain Whitepaper

Context

Ryzhom:

"Framing Holochain - a non-blockchain architecture for distributed social applications (dApps or hApps) and the ground level for further expanding an evolvable, fully distributed framework for coordinated sense-making and collective value-creation (i.e., means of articulating value) on all scales. Even though it had been conceived of and slowly developed for over more than a decade (by a group of people with already significant experience in designing systems currencies), Holochain only recently came to wider attention with an Initial Community Offering, Holo - a set of base application components and modules intended to introduce Holochain to the wider public and set the wheels in motion (the hApp prototying and development tools are designed to make development as straightforward, accessible and easy to understand as possible, somewhat similar to a simple web development framework).

Instead of extending, modifying and reiterating upon the usual monolithic blockchain base, Holochain brings in a wholly different architecture for decentralized data coordination based on distributed hash tables (DHTs) as the public space (a familiar implementation of which is the BitTorrent file sharing mechanism). DHTs are tables of key-value pairs stored in overlapping shards among network peers. They provide a highly efficient and generalizable basis for managing application data and carrying out routing across large-scale peer-to-peer networks. Agents, by virtue of their agency, can easily bridge between the spaces of different Holochain applications (hApps), translating one context into another or importing validated datasets from one app into another. Holochain is, as such, an agent-centric model, whereas blockchains and most other forms of DLT are data-centric, rigidly deterministic and highly limited in their functional capacities (Bitcoin is said to have engineered artificial scarcity supported by an arms race lottery of enormous waste, so-called “proof-of-work”).

This general arrangement sets the stage for a quickly expanding pool of diverse hApps and their rich networks of flowing information, available for agents/users to pull into all kinds of possible compositional abstractions, combining different flow indicators (as hApps or reusable functional components) in information system feedbacks. Additionally, it is extremely lightweight and highly scalable (DHTs are already pragmatically sharded between the relevant participants) - a set of properties that immediately resolve all the critical flaws of blockchain-based systems (scalability, sustainability and social consensus). (i.e., means of articulating value) on all scales. Even though it had been conceived of and slowly developed for over more than a decade (by a group of people with already significant experience in designing systems currencies), Holochain only recently came to wider attention with an Initial Community Offering, Holo - a set of base application components and modules intended to introduce Holochain to the wider public and set the wheels in motion (the hApp prototying and development tools are designed to make development as straightforward, accessible and easy to understand as possible, somewhat similar to a simple web development framework)." (https://rhyzome.github.io/Ceptr-and-Holochain/)

Definition

"Holochain provides a data structure that can be used to build decentralized apps. You have your own chain, which you can add data to, including financial transactions. The chains can merge, split, and interact in complex ways. The data is stored in a decentralized way (like Bittorrent). The data has a hash, which is a mathematical fingerprint that corresponds to the data. If someone tampers with the data, the mismatch between the data and the hash will be noticed, and the data rejected as invalid. Digital signatures guarantee the authorship of the data. It’s Bittorrent plus git plus digital signatures." (https://medium.com/h-o-l-o/heres-holochain-in-100-200-and-500-words-509818aa3c88)

Description

1. Aaron Fernando:

"Although the proponents of Holochain proudly stand by the fact that it is not a blockchain, for the layperson Holochain has very many similar use-cases. One main difference is that it comes without the prerequisite of using the enormous amounts of energy required by "proof-of-work" blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum, yet it is still possible to run a blockchain exactly like Bitcoin on Holochain. Instead of having only one global agreement about what data is valid (as with a regular blockchain), individual users create their own intermeshed ledgers of valid data and personal histories.

Additionally, whenever we access a website on the Internet, we are really accessing information hosted on servers operated by some third party — usually in a location we don't care about, owned by a separate private company. What Holochain makes possible is a blockchain-like method and reward structure for storing and accessing data and applications between users themselves, without having to rely on these third parties. This makes it possible to create and run applications of any sort between users, allowing the operation of a truly peer-to-peer internet." (https://www.shareable.net/blog/10-blockchain-projects-to-keep-an-eye-on)

2.

"Holochain is a more efficient alternative to blockchain. The Ethereum blockchain burns through huge amounts of computational power. It does that to achieve a universal consensus, to make sure everyone agrees on where all the coins are.

Holochain has no native currency, it’s a “roll your own currency” crypto-accounting platform. Instead of watching coins, we keep an eye on accounts. Invalid transactions (increasing balance illicitly) simply get rejected by the network.

This eliminates the need for consensus, and that allows us to make our computing much more efficient. We reckon it will be at least 10,000 times more efficient than Ethereum.

There is huge interest in developing decentralized applications, but sooner or later they run into the inherent problems of blockchain. Besides being inefficient, Ethereum uses a unique programming language called Solidity. Solidity developers are in short supply, and I have seen many projects delayed by this shortage. Holochain supports Javascript and Lisp. There are many Javascript developers to every Solidity developer, so the development of distributed applications will move along quicker." (https://medium.com/h-o-l-o/heres-holochain-in-100-200-and-500-words-509818aa3c88)

3. Holochain in exactly 500 words

"Holochain combines hashing, digital signatures, and DHTs to form a tamper-proof distributed ledger.

Hashing is a technique that collapses a bunch of data into a fingerprint that looks like this:

6d28d7cf56c26dd99752b0cafc1b14865846e660

If you change just one byte in the data, it no longer matches the hash. If you download a software program, and make sure what you downloaded has the proper hash, then you know that no one has inserted any malware or funny stuff.

Dual-key cryptography is a basic cryptographic technique, used in all sorts of ways in computer science. There is a public key (like a username) that is shared with the world, and a private key (like a password) that is not.

Dual-key cryptography is used to create digital signatures. Digital signatures work like this: I take a message, combine it with my private key, and stir it with some mathematics to create a signature. You can look at the signature, the message and my public key, and verify that the owner of the corresponding private key signed that message. If the message was altered, the signature wouldn’t check out. If someone tried to sign it without knowing my private key (which I store offline), it wouldn’t check out. I trust a software publisher, I know their public key, and so I download the software and check they’ve signed it. That confirms that the software really came from them, and hasn’t been altered since they signed it.

If I stream video from YouTube, the video is stored on YouTube’s computers. I point my browser to a particular URL, and it downloads whatever file is sitting there. I am a recipient only. By contrast, a distributed hash table (DHT) is a thing that allows you to download data from your neighbours. With a DHT, I ask peers on the network, “Who has the file with the hash 23ae47x?”, download chunks of it from whoever has it near me, and then combine them to form a full file.

DHT downloads are faster and more resilient than downloading from a server. They also put less strain on the network. Imagine a group of friends all watch a viral video on YouTube. Every time one of them watches it, the server — which may be on the other side of the world — has to send it again. If they were watching using a peer-to-peer system like a DHT, once one of them had it, he could send it to his neighbours.

Because content on a DHT is identified by its hash, I always get exactly what I asked for; it’s impossible for an attacker to replace it with something fishy.

These are the tools that build holochains. Digital signatures ensure no one can mess with my ledger without leaving a trail of signatures. Hashing ensures the data transferred is exactly what was requested. A DHT decentralizes the storage of this data, so that it’s hosted by the community rather than a company. This makes it a secure, distributed, tamper-proof ledger." (https://medium.com/h-o-l-o/heres-holochain-in-100-200-and-500-words-509818aa3c88)

Characteristics

Arthur Brock et al.:

"Holochain delivers on the dreams of making decentralized computing easy and real. It provides the underlying cryptographic fabric to maintain data integrity across unlimited peers without requiring consensus.

Integrity without consensus means:

● immediate and efficient processing,

● no proof-of-work,

● no proof-of-stake,

● no energy wasted on mining,

● no bottlenecks nor global delays.

In fact, Holochain is so efficient that you can run over 50 full nodes on a cell phone or a $35 Raspberry Pi computer. Holochain even enables scalable crypto-accounting to build new generations of asset-backed and value-stable cryptocurrencies.

Programmers can leverage our RAD tools (Rapid Application Development) to quickly build fully P2P web applications designed to operate on the scale of Twitter or Facebook with no centralized data centers or infrastructure. Each user just brings their own device to share a small amount of computing and storage.

Holochain meets the demands of people who want to:

● own their own data,

● control their identity,

● have automatic backups,

● customize their user experience,

● choose how to connect their applications,

● decide with whom to share their private information,

● and transact without dependence on banks or governments."

(https://files.holo.host/2017/12/Holo-Green-Paper.pdf)

Agent-Centric

Cameron Burgess:

"Sovereignty at the level of the agent — not at the level of the nation or the corporation, where “sovereign AI” currently means your government or your employer controls the stack instead of a hyperscaler — but at the level of every entity that generates data and deploys intelligence. Each maintains its own AI operations, establishes its own data boundaries, and communicates through protocols that preserve autonomy rather than requiring its surrender.

Scale that and you enable ecosystems of sovereign AI agents — collective intelligence without centralised extraction. The wisdom of crowds without the crowd being farmed. Distributed cognition without a centre that captures it."

(https://decent.holoventures.io/10-our-collective-promise/)

Holochain is Local First

"Local Networks (Shouldn’t) Need Global Internet

Local Area Networks (LAN), Mesh Networks, and other infrastructure like local servers and LANs that are networked together for say, a hospital or university, are all examples of internet protocols that are localized in some way.

So we can network computers locally, but most applications don’t work on this scale. If you are at the office and the internet connection goes out, you should still be able to use the office Slack to chat with colleagues in the next room over who are also using the office wifi. But you cannot.

HOLOCHAIN ALLOWS LOCAL-FIRST INTERACTION

Because Holochain applications function peer-to-peer and thus don’t rely on a central server, the application’s network scales to whatever devices are actually able to connect at that time. This means that if you can form a local connection over whatever networking protocol you share, from Bluetooth to TCP/IP, then you can interact with the people in the next room.

+ LOCAL DATA-INTEGRITY

Central servers grew in part from a need for security and data integrity. Central servers provide this security via firewalls and the rules of the software at both the server and application levels. For instance, we trust Slack’s servers (and the company itself), to ensure that only those supposed to be able to read from and post to a particular workspace have that access, avoiding spam or data collection by bad actors.

Holochain uses framework level validation rules to secure the integrity of data and application level membrane rules to control access. All of this is done on a peer-to-peer basis, so you can act locally and securely.

RESYNCING WITH THE GLOBAL INTERNET

So you can interact locally, but what happens when you connect back to the internet as the whole? Holochain applications are always designed with the assumption that the total network state is unknown, working directly with the network nodes connected at any given time. This means that they can always scale up and down as different parts of the network come online.

Holochain also includes provisions for local data caching so that you can save key pieces of global data in local stores in case of network interruption.

HOLOCHAIN APPS: LOCAL-FIRST, GLOBAL COORDINATION

Holochain applications are made to work at any scale. Working from a local-first basis, they work perfectly well at the level of an office or a town, but they also function for distributed teams and national governments. Because they are infrastructure agnostic, and don’t require central servers to hold user data, they can fluidly scale based on use and connectivity."

(https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/holochain-powers-local-first-software-holochain/)

Holochain is designed for AI security

Cameron Burgess:

"One breach of a centralised AI stack reaches everything behind it. That is the property this architecture removes. Holochain has no single ledger where every application’s data accumulates — each application runs its own network with its own membrane, and the contents of private entries never leave the agent’s own device. What an application publishes is visible to that network’s peers, which is what makes validation possible. But there is no layer above it where everything aggregates, and no central infrastructure to breach.

Each entity — individual, organisation, or community — can run AI agents on its own Holochain application DNA, with its own validation rules and data boundaries, its own security posture calibrated to what it’s actually protecting. You don’t build Fort Knox for a village post office. You don’t need the same security economy for internal comms AI as you do for financial operations AI. Agent-centric architecture means each function sets its own posture, because there’s no single network imposing a single model on everyone.

The practical stack mapping that we explore in the following section is straightforward. Holochain agents can run local AI models — trained on or tuned to the entity’s own data, communicating with other agents peer-to-peer through the same cryptographic mutual accountability that governs every other Holochain interaction. Our accounting software can handle the microtransaction economics when relevant: agent-to-agent service payments at fractions of a cent, that conventional payment rails can’t cost-effectively process. A clearinghouse layer between sovereign networks can settle cross-network exchanges without requiring any single network to surrender its autonomy. HoloFuel can denominate value. This is the work Holo Ventures — the commercial entity set up to deliver it — is now pursuing.

An identity wallet on agent-centric architecture — where the agent holds its own credentials and discloses only what each interaction requires — delivers the portability and selective disclosure the EU’s digital identity wallet promises citizens, without creating the thing that makes the centralised version dangerous: a single issuer positioned to observe every use, breachable in one incident, and compellable to hand over what it holds.

Agent-centric architecture produces data provenance as a natural byproduct of how it works. Every action signed to a source chain, every interaction countersigned, data lineage cryptographically verifiable without retrofitting anything. The provenance and transparency the AI Act now asks for aren’t retrofits for this infrastructure. They’re how it already works.

This is not a position paper on AI. We have no interest in telling anyone what models to run. What it points to is the infrastructure layer that makes any AI deployment structurally resistant to the things that keep security professionals awake at night. What the regulatory environment is now confirming is that the architecture was right before the regulations existed."

(https://decent.holoventures.io/04-transcending-the-original-vision/)

Technology

The full stack anno 2026:

1. Holochain — the foundation
2. Holo — distributed hosting
3. Unyt — the accounting engine
4. HoloFuel — the utility currency
5. Decent — the marketplace
6. The Weave and Moss — the experience layer

Holochain: the Foundation (Layer 1)

Cameron Burgess:

"Holochain is agent-centric: each agent maintains its own cryptographically secured chain of actions, validated by peers according to shared rules, published to a distributed hash table for global visibility — without requiring global consensus. There is no single ordering of events that everyone must agree on before anything can proceed. Peers on a network do converge on the same set of validated data — that convergence is what validation means — but each agent derives its own view from it, and agreement between parties is required only where a transaction actually involves them. Yet agent-centric is only half the story: Holochain starts with empowered agency but always exercises it inside social accountability — an action is valid only if it plays by the shared rules of its network, and peers validate that it acted properly. The balance that keeps social systems healthy is written directly into the architecture. Agents interact directly. They reach agreement only when agreement is necessary.

...

One consequence trips up almost everyone: there is no such thing as ‘the Holochain network’. Ethereum and Solana are each one global network with one ledger. Holochain is a pattern for spinning up as many independent networks as there are applications — each with its own rules, its own participants, and its own membrane. When something runs ‘on Holochain’, it runs its own network built with Holochain; it does not join one big shared one."

Holo: Distributed Hosting Infrastructure (Layer 2)

Cameron Burgess:

"What exists now: distributed hosting infrastructure, operating. Edge nodes that keep an application’s data available when none of its users are online — work that enables hosting models the original 2017 design couldn’t anticipate, where a network persists independently of who happens to be connected. The HoloPort hardware programme put dedicated hosting nodes into the hands of early believers — and those devices remain part of the network. HoloPorts run the same node software as any commodity hardware. What’s evolved is the model: distributed hosting no longer requires dedicated devices, and the network is stronger for being open to any hardware that can run the software. The hosting vision is not abandoned. It’s operational, continuing to develop, and now situated within a broader stack that gives it substantially more to do.

The original economic argument — that commodity hardware aggregated across a distributed network can substantially undercut centralised cloud pricing — has since been validated by an entire sector. Decentralised compute networks now report general compute costs up to 85% lower than centralised cloud providers, with GPU access running at roughly one-third the cost of equivalent AWS instances in live marketplace comparisons.46 The structural reason is unchanged from 2017: centralised cloud providers price for data centre overhead, redundancy guarantees, vendor margin, and the premium that comes with operating at monopoly scale. Thirty percent of global cloud spending — approximately $217 billion of a projected $723 billion spend in 2025 — is estimated to be waste: idle resources, over-provisioning, and timing inefficiencies. Distributed commodity hardware eliminates a portion of that overhead — and it carries a further structural advantage: it obviates cooling load that runs to more than 30% of electricity use in less efficient data centres. In a home hosting model, that energy is simply waste heat absorbed into a living space — and in cold climates, it contributes to heating needs while doing useful work. The argument was right. The delivery was late.

What’s evolved since 2017 is the hosting model itself, and the evolution solves a problem the original design left open. Holo will support two distinct hosting types. In micro-hosting, individual hosts set their own prices and make their nodes available for work, negotiating directly with app providers. For this type of hosting, what Holo provides is the proof-of-service infrastructure for invoicing work in HoloFuel. This works well for smaller applications and developers who want flexible, cost-competitive infrastructure without platform lock-in. In macro-hosting, the customer sets their requirements and price range, and Holo acts as the single commercial counterparty for enterprise clients — aggregating capacity from across the host network and presenting it as a unified, contracted service — and the host bids for inclusion on the hosting project. A large deployment cannot practically negotiate with thousands of independent node operators at different prices; the macro tier solves that without centralising the infrastructure that delivers it. The hosting is still distributed. The commercial relationship is not.

These aren’t competing models. They serve different groups at different scales, and together they mean Holo can play credibly at both ends of the market — the developer building on cost-competitive commodity infrastructure, and the enterprise client who needs predictable pricing and a single point of accountability."

(https://decent.holoventures.io/05-the-stack/)

Unyt: The Accounting Engine (Layer 3)

Cameron Burgess:

"Unyt is the economic engine of the stack. It is the software that makes HoloFuel work — and that makes any mutual credit currency work on Holochain. Unyt is programmable economic infrastructure: an accounting engine that can denominate any economic relationship in any unit, weave value flows between parties according to rules they set, and settle with cryptographic integrity without requiring a blockchain or a trusted intermediary.

Unyt’s Smart Agreements are akin to smart contracts on a blockchain, but significantly more flexible. They are programmable economic logic that executes locally — between the parties to an agreement — rather than requiring global network consensus. And more powerful still: the agreements can be updated as a network’s needs evolve, without rebuilding anything.48 In other words, Unyt works the way people work.

When I give my neighbour’s child $2 for lemonade, the only two people who need to know about, and validate, the transaction and her. What we don’t need, and what would be an absurd waste, would be to have everyone in the entire neighbourhood see, review, and validate our transaction. Unlike traditional blockchain smart contracts — where upgradeability requires migration to a new contract address, breaking continuity — Smart Agreements are soft-coded: the rules can be updated by agreement of the parties in place, without migration. A single Unyt deployment can handle multiple currencies, and multiple accounting tokens per transaction simultaneously — flowing in both directions — alongside internal accounting units, loyalty points, reputation scores, and any other quantified value, all with the same cryptographic guarantees. One instance supports up to 65,000 units of account.

The Unyt - Crypto-Accounting Engine launched in September 2025. P2P payments, community currency tooling, and Smart Agreements shipped in Q4 2025. Bi-directional payments, blockchain bridging to EVM Layer 2 networks, and market oracles shipped in Q1 202649 — the infrastructure the HOT-to-HoloFuel migration will run on."

(https://decent.holoventures.io/05-the-stack/)

HoloFuel: The Utility Currency (Layer 4)

Cameron Burgess:

"HoloFuel is a mutual credit currency designed as a medium of exchange, not a speculative asset. Mutual credit currencies and similar instruments have been in use for nearly a century, but are quite different from the fiat currencies that currently surround us. In a mutual credit currency the net supply is always zero — every positive balance is exactly matched by a corresponding negative balance. No currency is created from nothing; supply expands when credit is extended and contracts when it is repaid. The currency breathes in response to real economic activity.

HoloFuel is earned by providing utility to the network and sold to no one. Hosting was the first form that utility took.

Most cryptocurrencies fail the most basic test of a functioning currency: stability. Bitcoin’s fixed supply was supposed to solve the trust problem inherent in fiat’s discretionary monetary policy. It solved supply predictability. It did nothing for price predictability — and a currency whose value can move 20% in an hour is unusable for any ordinary economic purpose. HoloFuel’s value is anchored to productive capacity, not scarcity. That anchoring is what makes it functional as a medium of exchange rather than a vehicle for speculation.

Credit limits are algorithmic and role-specific. Hosts earn credit capacity through demonstrated service delivery; that is, productive activity generates credit. End users require positive balances to spend. Gaming the system contracts it.

What’s changed since 2017 is the scope. HoloFuel was designed as a currency for distributed hosting. Given the added layer of Unyt, it’s now a more inclusive utility currency that any values-aligned project can adopt instead of launching their own speculative token. This matters because the overhead of token issuance is enormous: legal analysis in every jurisdiction, exchange negotiations, market-making, tokenomics management, governance of the token separate from governance of the project, and a speculator community whose interests may actively conflict with the project’s actual users. A project building on Holochain can use HoloFuel as its native currency without any of that."

(https://decent.holoventures.io/05-the-stack/)

Decent: The Marketplace (Layer 5)

Cameron Burgess:

"A marketplace is where people meet. A market is where they do business. The distinction is old and it runs in one direction: the square came before the exchange, the fair before the trading floor. People gathered, discovered who else was there and what they were doing, and trade followed from that.

So that’s the order we’re building in; Decent starts as a marketplace.

What opens with the migration. Decent launches alongside the migration, as a directory of organisations building and operating decent infrastructure — a place where people working on similar problems can find each other, be visible to those seeking them, and connect with organisations doing adjacent work. Listing is open to any organisation whose work is aligned with what this paper describes. It’s self-serve: you supply your details, and each listing is verified by a person before it goes live, so the directory can’t be turned against the people relying on it.

What a listing gets you is visibility, connection to organisations working in the same direction, and — where there’s a fit — the beginning of a conversation with Holo Ventures about doing something together. Some of the organisations listed will want to accept HoloFuel for what they offer. That’s available, and the route to it is to get in touch; but it isn’t the price of entry.

Where it’s headed. With enough organisations wanting to transact with each other, a marketplace becomes a market — and at that point the architecture has a problem to solve that’s worth describing now, because it’s the reason the Unyt accounting engine was built the way it was.

Every cryptocurrency exchange operates on trading pairs. To exchange Token A for Token B, you need a market with liquidity on both sides. This seems manageable for two tokens. The mathematics become structurally untenable at scale. To support exchange between n tokens, a trading pair system requires n(n−1)/2 markets — 45 markets for 10 tokens, 4,950 for 100, 499,500 for 1,000. Each market requires independent liquidity — capital locked on both sides, held by market makers extracting fees for providing it. Capital that could be doing useful economic work sits idle in thousands of pools. Tokens without access to major exchanges or venture-backed market-making cannot participate at meaningful depth. The “permissionless” exchange ecosystem has a permissions layer enforced by capital requirements instead of approval processes.

The trading pair model is barter economics with better infrastructure. Barter has a double-coincidence-of-wants problem — to trade, both parties must simultaneously want what the other has. Trading pairs inherit it precisely: you can only swap Token A for Token B if someone is on the other side of that specific pair, right now, with liquidity to match.

The Decent Marketplace applies a solution that commodity exchanges have used for centuries: a clearinghouse with a common unit of account. You do not trade TFT directly for HOT. You price both via oracles and convert atomically through a common accounting layer. Ten tokens: ten oracle feeds, not forty-five bilateral markets. One thousand tokens: one thousand oracle feeds, not half a million trading pairs. The cost to add a new currency to a clearinghouse is O(1). The cost to add a new currency to a trading pair network is O(n)."

(https://decent.holoventures.io/05-the-stack/)

Weave and Moss: The Experience Layer (Layer 6)

Cameron Burgess:

"Everything described so far sits beneath the surface — the protocol, the hosting, the accounting engine, the currency, the marketplace. None of it is what a person actually opens and uses. That top layer, the one people touch, is where decentralised technology has most often come undone: the usable products were either single-purpose silos, or — as with the crypto interfaces in Section 1 — quietly re-centralised at the access layer even while the protocol beneath them stayed open. What has rarely been built is an experience layer that is itself agent-centric: general-purpose, own-your-data, groups assembling their own interoperable tools with no platform in the middle. The Weave and Moss are that layer — early, but real.

The Weave is an open standard for social context. The web got three open standards that let anyone publish and link documents — HTML, HTTP, and the URL — but it never got one that let groups own and manage their shared context, which is exactly why that function was captured by the platforms: Facebook holds your group, GitHub holds your code, Google holds your collaboration. The Weave adds the missing standard — the Weave Interaction Pattern — for creating, searching, linking, and organising units of social context, so that independent groupware ‘Tools’, each a small Holochain application, interoperate, embed inside one another, and can be searched across every group you belong to, with no central server anywhere. Making an existing Holochain app Weave-compatible is a task of minutes, not months.

Moss is not an application; it is a runtime. If The Weave is the standard, Moss is the browser — what Mosaic and Netscape were to the early web: the thing through which ordinary people first actually use what lies beneath. Rather than doing one thing, Moss runs a whole suite of independent Holochain applications side by side, in a single coherent space that a group owns and controls — more than twenty of them in an open, free library, and growing."

(https://decent.holoventures.io/05-the-stack/)

The emerging hApps ecosystem

Directory:

1. Your Own AI Desktop app running AI models locally, with signed, tamper-evident conversation records on Holochain AI / privacy
2. Volla Holochain apps shipping on production phone hardware Mobile
3. Coasys Agent-centric social and interoperability layer Social / interop
4. Acorn Collaborative project and outcome mapping Productivity
5. HummHive Censorship-resistant publishing, live on Holo Publishing
6. Requests & Offers Agent-centric, distributed marketplace of services, skills, and resources Marketplace
7. HREA ValueFlows accounting infrastructure for economic networks Economic infrastructure Nondominium Open Value Network for Peer Production Peer production
8. Flowsta Holochain-native SSO, OAuth2, and developer libraries Identity / auth

Further projects are building on Holochain at earlier stages, including the

1. Internet of Energy Network (IOEN — clean-energy microgrids),
2. Kwaxala (Indigenous-led forest investment), and the
3. Carbon Farm Network with NY Textile Lab (regenerative fibre supply chains).

Governance

Cameron Burgess:

"Two entities carry the work forward. The Holochain Foundation is a non-profit steward. It holds the protocol’s intellectual property and exists to keep it open, neutral, and available to anyone — including those who will go on to compete with us. It has no shareholders and no owner to enrich; its only mandate is to keep the commons a commons. The protocol sits with the Foundation, because it belongs on no one’s balance sheet.

Holo Ventures is the ecosystem’s commercial entity. It builds and operates commercial software across the full Holochain stack — distributed hosting, peer-to-peer accounting, and collaboration tooling — alongside a professional-services arm that helps others design and ship on the same infrastructure. Every component is open source and auditable. There are no gas fees, no platform lock-in, and the one fee in the system is capped at 1% of value. Holo Ventures earns mainly by building and delivering software and services that work, not by taxing the people who use them or the networks that run on them."

(https://decent.holoventures.io/09-structured-against-capture/)

Designing the Holochain ecosystem to avoid the capture of the commons

Cameron Burgess:

"Capture is not caused by bad actors; it is what happens when you build a centre and run capital through it. A mission held inside an ordinary company can be sold with the company; a business that lives on transaction fees or token appreciation is pulled, over time, back toward extraction. So Holo Ventures is a mission-protected commercial entity — owned by the Foundation and bound by constitutional safeguards designed to hold its mission integrity regardless of how large it grows. The protocol stays in the commons; the commercial entity is structurally constrained from becoming the thing this paper warns against. We are not asking you to trust that we will resist the pull toward a centre. We have tried to make it structurally impossible for us to drift there — the protocol is open and forkable whatever we do.

The obvious comparison is OpenAI — also founded as a non-profit around a mission, with a capped-profit structure meant to keep commercial upside in check. In 2023, its board’s authority was overridden within days of the one time it tried to use it. By 2025, the profit cap was gone and the fundraising limits lifted.52 The non-profit still holds nominal control and a large stake, and reasonable people argue that’s enough — but the point is simpler than who’s right: governance you can renegotiate is not the same as architecture you can’t. Caps get raised and charters rewritten when the cheque is large enough. An open protocol cannot be un-opened. The final safeguard is the one the original Green Paper named: you can run Holochain without us.

That is the role we intend to play. The Foundation keeps the protocol free; Holo Ventures makes the values-aligned economy commercially real — building the software, operating the infrastructure, and earning by delivering it rather than by owning the networks that run on it. The work ahead is to put this into the hands of the people the mainstream system was never built to serve — the regenerative finance projects, the community currency organisers, the mutual aid networks, the cooperative enterprises, the impact organisations, and the developers who want to run AI locally without feeding a surveillance stack.

Those are the builders. But the unit this architecture ultimately answers to is smaller and more universal than any of them: the individual. Agent-centric infrastructure pushes sovereignty all the way down to the person — which means its real constituency is anyone who would rather not watch money and influence concentrate, year after year, at their expense. Which is to say, most of us.

The work keeps moving, and we’ve learned not to turn that into a roadmap. So, as directions rather than commitments: we’re working to ensure Holochain applications run wherever people already are — in the browser with no installation, and on mobile and desktop as easily as any other app. The decentralisation has to reach the layer people actually touch; an alternative almost no one can practically use is not yet an alternative.

And we’re building the runtime that lets agents operate on the network. The same architecture that lets a person own their data lets an AI agent run on infrastructure its owner controls — and settle in mutual credit, not on the payment rails the incumbents are racing to own before the agent economy has even arrived.

We’re not in that race. We don’t need to own this economy — we just need it to exist, and to be impossible to capture once it does."

(https://decent.holoventures.io/09-structured-against-capture/)

Discussion

"Holographic storage for distributed applications. A holochain is a validating distributed hash table (DHT) where every node enforces validation rules on data against the signed chains where the data originated.

In other words, a holochain functions very much like a blockchain without bottlenecks when it comes to enforcing validation rules, but is designed to be fully distributed through sharding so each node only needs to hold a portion of the data instead of a full copy of a global ledger. This makes it feasible to run blockchain-like applications on devices as lightweight as mobile phones

Historically, data integrity has been ensured by restricting access to data. If we wanted to prevent anybody from tampering with data, we locked it behind firewalls, or set strict permissions on databases and file systems. Because with centrally stored data, having the ability to write to data typically means you can change whatever you want.

If we want to build peer-to-peer systems where we collectively hold data among many parties, we need better strategies for shared data integrity. Many are excited about building these kinds of applications on the blockchain, because they provide a strategy to maintain integrity of data that can be held by many peers without a single central authority.

However, other limitations have become apparent, such as high computational overhead for achieving consensus, and the Pareto Effects of Proof of Work and Proof of Stake which steer the system toward being more centralized than many would want.

Breakthroughs in shared data integrity enable new social, political, and organizational patterns with less tendencies toward corruption that emerge from power imbalances involved with selective parties controlling data, information, and protocols.

We believe Holochains are one of these breakthroughs, because they take a different approach to ensuring the integrity of shared data. Instead of being built on top of cryptographic tokens they are organized around cryptographic validation of people (peers) validated against an immutable cryptographic record of those peers actions.

This change allows us to manage data integrity without the massive overhead of computing consensus on a global ledger. Our monotonic, validating, graph DHT (distributed hash table) achieves eventual consistency while only allowing valid data to propagate and holding everyone accountable for their actions.

The lower overhead of this approach makes it feasible to run full nodes on devices like cell phones or tablets which don’t have massive computing power.

Holochain is designed as a data integrity engine for distributed applications. Unlike a distributed database, there are no methods for users to directly interact with the data because this would bypass application specific validation rules. All interactions happen only through the application code which enforce whatever business rules, application logic, or restrictions they need to, since different applications have different demands for strictness." (http://ceptr.org/projects/holochain)

Ferananda Ibarra on how the holochain philosophy differs from that of the blockchain

"When I talk about the blockchain, I think about the Wright brothers inventing the airplane and they did notinvent a faster plane. They just invented the plane. They didn’t consider the need for airports and all the infrastructure that came after. We can think about the blockchain as something that has showed us there’s a possibility for humanity and decentralization that we haven’t seen before. It’s an innovation, but it’s not the faster plane and it’s not the best plane. Bitcoin is in the same category. In the case of Holochain and Holo, a global consensus doesn’t make sense because nature does not work that way. As an example of this, we can see that cells carry their own instruction set - their DNA - inside. They don’t need a record of every state of every type of cell on what it is that they’re doing. Thatis not needed. It’s extra complexity, in the same way that speakers of a language can carry the means to generate sentences, but they do not have every sentence that has been spoken in some way or another somewhere. It’s not the way that nature works and that’s why, in my opinion, blockchain can’t work.

The other point that Douglas made was tokens. Decentralization is not about token unification of everything. It’s about flows. It’s about people. It’s about what people can do together and how we organize our actions and coordinate ourselves better, which iskind of the central conversation for today.

In Holochain, we think about agents. so we think about each person. If we take the example of the park: if it’s 20 people they can organize without a ledger, but if it’s a 150 people and there are agreements that every agent needs to know in order to be able to participate? They can track their contributions and they can track things about the specific time set for things and so it would make sense, but it wouldn’t be about a token. It would be about the flows of coordination and cooperation and what it is that they want to see. Currencies help us in the definition of Metacurrency as a way to make visible, enable, or shape a flow so in that regards, the technology should enable us the capacity for holisticism to be able to see the whole so that the parts can organize themselves themselves better and be much better players.

That’s what we mean by collective intelligence and so in Holochain, Metacurrency, and Holo, we’re about human collective intelligence, augmented human collective intelligence and how these technologies can support us for the colony for our shared agreements. In the next round, I can talk about the commons engine, which is my next role in Holo after the ICO." (https://diglife.com/decentralized-co-operation-at-scale/)

Four Reasons to support the Holo / Holochain project

By Jean Russell:

They are both "Inspired by natural systems and living ecology principles. Biomimicry applied to crypto-technology.

• Holo rewards people for sharing hosting capacity with the most minimal transaction fees because it is designed to serve hosts and those hosted rather than a central office that controls the flow. It solves the challenge of managing minuscule bits of data and tracking the accounting of them without adding to the complexity.

• Holochain is agent-centric not data-centric, meaning that it is putting the participant at the center of control and ownership. I own my data. I control permissions for others to access it. And by starting with the person at the center and then connecting them to a larger system, Holochain manages the dance between identity as something I control and something I am situated in (my reputation and activity engaging with others).

• I can imagine the applications this structural design makes possible, and they excite me. I can imagine applications that honor my lived experience as it truly is. I can imagine markets that help companies address risks by funding nonprofits to address those concerns. I can imagine applications and even currencies that help us make visible the value flowing in our communities, giving dignity to all contributions and contributors."

(https://medium.com/h-o-l-o/thrivabletechnology-3371a6a9ff8b)

The Holochain is the most promising project so far for building cooperative coins

Oliver Sylvester-Bradley:

"Of all the current crypto currency options Holo stands out because it based on the Holochain (a more efficient way of encoding transitions) and it’s currency is not only going to be based on “mutual credit” but its also going to backed by computer processing power. It’s well worth watching this great video from Philip Beadle to get an idea of how blockchain works and the differences between Bitcoin, Etherium and Holochain – especially from an app building point of view.

Holo are just concluding a very successful crowdfunder which aims to provide the ‘bridging technology’ to bring holo into the mainstream. The ‘hosting boxes’ (holo ports) people have bought through the crowdfunder will allow non-technically minded people to simply plug a spare hard drive in to their router to provide storage capacity and processing power on the Holo network.

The Holo network is nothing short of true peer-to-peer. Meaning that users can access each others computers directly, without the need to go via Google’s or Amazon’s servers. In fact, they can host and runs applications on the Holo network, in much the same way as BitTorrent works. This provides incredible opportunities for scaling (as more peers join the network, everyone benefits from ‘the network effect’) and, equally as importantly, the opportunity to re-define how the applications that run on the network are designed to work; it solves the entire “net neutrality” issue completely. Holo, and the people behind it, have designed the Holo network to work in a more “user centric” way than the way the web works today.

The Holo ICO is a very HOT topic. Art Brock, one of the founders of the project, has written about building responsible crypto currencies and agrees that

- “Cryptocurrencies do not have to be gambling tokens created from nothing. They can be responsibly connected to assets, promises, or real-world value. They don’t have to re-create all the speculative money problems that they were supposed to be solving”.

Currencies can be optimised to be a useful means of exchange, or a useful store of value, but rarely work well when trying to be both at the same time. “Holo fuel” (also known as HOT, or Holo Tokens) are designed to provide a medium of exchange on the Holo network. Their ICO requires users to buy HOT with ETH (another crypto currency).

Given that buying in to the Holo ICO with ETH will be at a specific price, we were keen to understand how the value of HOT has been calculated, how it hopes to avoid being linked in value to ETH and other crypto currency prices in the future, and how HOT will avoid suffering from speculation?

We put the question to Jean Russell, project lead for the Holo ICO, who answered as follows:

- HOT is set as 10k x ETH for the launch. But that is just the initial set. Once the network starts, then 1 HOT = 1 Holo fuel. And Holo fuel is about the value of hosting in Holo.

Surely there will arise an exchange that will convert ETH to Holo fuel, so they will be relational in some way. However, even if the Ethereum system collapses, Holo can continue and the value should not be negatively impacted. We believe that we will be much more than 10,000x faster/cheaper than Ethereum (mostly because that system in some ways was designed to be difficult and slow as part of the security). Our system is designed for scalability and resilience (DHT) so it should get better as it scales. Anti-fragile in fact.

The initial price (and the practical network value the community gives it) will be a gap that speculators can guess at. Thereafter though, it should remain fairly stable as it is really about the asset and the value of that asset in the marketplace.

I can’t give the deep philosophical explanation that Art can, but what I hear from him is that mutual credit along with asset-backing pretty much assures that it can’t be a gambling game of high stakes. Those who invest early when there is high risk of the platform getting off the ground will gain some benefit, yes. But then it should achieve a meta-stable state.

We have high hopes for Holo. With Holochain offering a viable alternative to blockchain it should, naturally, benefit from “second mover advantage” by learning a lot of lessons from its predecessor. The way it has been designed from a holographic, and sociocratic perspective seems to fit the requirements of a co-operative economy which distributes ownership and governance to the lowest possible levels.

If their ICO, which they are calling an “Initial Community Offering“, goes well it will be very interesting to see how this first major alternative to the blockchain based systems develops.

If Holo is successful and a vibrant peer to peer community emerges, perhaps the Holo Network would be the place to launch a dedicated co-op coin? Much of the hard work, in terms of underlying infrastructure, will have been done so a launching a co-op coin on holo should not be as hard as starting from scratch. The main issues would be achieving agreement between a sufficient number of stakeholders about a co-op coins parameters, mainly it’s issuance and the management of supply and demand." (https://open.coop/2018/01/25/co-op-coin-ico-look-like/)

Status

"Holochain, and the collective of projects it has stewarded over the years, hasn’t built a single product, but together delivers a layered architecture." [1]

What went wrong ?

Here is where the Holochain leadership answers all the difficult questions about 'what went wrong' until now. A stellar example of straightforwardness: https://decent.holoventures.io/a2-questions-and-objections/

2026

< " we’re still here, and we’re still building. The code is in the repositories, the protocol is stable, and the infrastructure runs. We haven’t delivered at the scale or on the timeline we hoped and promised. But we haven’t stopped. " >

Cameron Burgess et al. :

"We raised significant ICO money in 2018, listed the token on exchanges to give it liquidity, and got caught in exactly the dynamics this paper criticises. After years of delays, we were relegated — in some people’s minds — to the same scrapheap as EOS and a thousand other projects that promised the world and struggled to deliver. We understand why. We made timeline commitments we couldn’t keep. We got too internalised — too consumed by the social, economic, and technical gravity of what we were building and the organisational weight of building it — and over time we began to lose the orientation toward service that the entire project embodied at the start. We’re not insulated from that critique. We’re directly implicated in it.

What we don’t accept is the category. We used the financial machinery of 2018 because it was the only machinery there was — if you needed capital to build, you issued a token, and tokens attract speculators no matter what they were sold to do. But we were never building a better blockchain, or making another wager on the same architecture. We were building the web 3.0 that the prevailing crypto industry architecture claimed to be, but could never become by design. The infrastructure we’re now shipping is what makes the machinery we had to use unnecessary.

That being said, we’re also one of the very few early ICO projects that are still operational. HOT, the ERC-20 token from our 2018 ICO, peaked at $0.03 in April 2021 — a moment when the notional value of our treasury touched $284 million, and it would have been easy to read that number as a measure of success. It wasn’t. It was part of the speculative tide that lifted the entire sector, and it receded just as fast. Today HOT trades around $0.0004. That’s also an almost 99% decline from peak. We’re not telling you this because we think you haven’t noticed. We’re telling you this because it’s the same story as EOS, Filecoin, Bancor and Tezos — all of which raised eight to ten times what we did and now sit at tiny fractions of their all-time highs. And it isn’t a story about who shipped and who didn’t. Filecoin built working decentralised storage; Internet Computer put live infrastructure in the market. Both still fell more than 99% from their 2021 peaks. The price tracked the asset class, not the delivery — which is exactly the dynamic we’re describing. It’s the same story as the majority of projects in this space, and if we’re going to ask you to pay attention to what we’ve built, we have to stand inside that economic reality without flinching.

One critical difference is that we’re still here, and we’re still building. The code is in the repositories, the protocol is stable, and the infrastructure runs. We haven’t delivered at the scale or on the timeline we hoped and promised. But we haven’t stopped. And that distinction is about to matter."

(https://decent.holoventures.io/01-the-revolution-that-wasnt/)

2024

An update on the Holochain Foundation, November 2024:

Eric Harris-Braun:

"(Whither) the Holochain Foundation? Foremost, the Foundation will move from being a passive holder of the Holochain intellectual property, on behalf of the community, into being the active operational entity supporting and managing the Holochain development team.

Part of our “coming of age” is realizing that we can’t do everything we might like. Focus matters. Our strategic plan for delivering on our mission of “fostering the evolution and thriving of the Holochain framework and related ecosystems”, begins with just one thing: The stability and reliability of Holochain, such that it can be deployed as industrial-strength, mission-critical infrastructure by commercial projects as well as our community stakeholders. What this means in practice is testing, testing, testing!

(https://blog.holochain.org/the-holochain-foundation-is-coming-of-age/)

More Information

• Article: Decent Infrastructure in an Authoritarian World. Building the Walk Away Stack. By Cameron Burgess et al. Holo Ventures, September 2026.

URL = https://decent.holoventures.io/

Excellent update on what Holochain is about anno 2026.

* Article: Holochain. Distributed Coordination by Scaled Consent, not Global Consensus. By Eric Harris-Braun, Arthur Brock, and Paul d’Aoust. (Dated: 2024-11-08 — v2.0)

URL = https://www.holochain.org/documents/holochain-white-paper-2.0.pdf

"We present a generalized system for large-scale distributed coordination that does not rely on global consensus, explicating the problem instead through the lens of scaling consent. After establishing initial axioms, we illustrate their application for coordination in games, then provide a formal outline of the necessary integrity guarantees and functional components needed to deliver those guarantees. Finally, we provide a fairly detailed, high-level, technical specification for our operating implementation for scaling consent."

• Pre-release Draft of whitepaper by Arthur Brock [2] and Eric Harris-Braun [3]:

"We describe a holographic data storage architecture which combines the data integrity assurance of Hash-Chains with the efficiency of Distributed Hash Tables while eliminating consensus bottlenecks typical of Blockchain and typical approaches to distributed computing."

• Holo

Technical documentation and resources

1. Holochain: holochain.org (source code)
2. Holo: holo.host
3. Unyt: unyt.co (source code)
4. Moss: moss.social (source code)

• Holochain AI Tools: A collection of AI-agent assets (Claude Code skills, eventually plugins and MCP servers) for working with the Holochain ecosystem. [4]