Hello. We’re Holo.

Remember the way the internet was first architected?

It's an amazing human invention: a network design so resilient it could withstand a nuclear war. The key design principle: no single point(s) of failure. No centralised control of vital data, so any node in the network could be destroyed, and all our vital data would survive, distributed across many other nodes and geographies.

But until recently, apps were written with the opposite approach: the assumption of a central data store, a definitive single source of truth.

There are plenty of situations where a central data store is unsuitable. Some ingenious solutions to this have emerged, such as blockchain. They rely instead on highly complex ways to reach a global consensus across a decentralised network. Ways that are certainly ingenious, but also difficult to explain, compared with the simplicity of a central, single source of truth.

At Internet scale, the price of global consensus is far too high for most of us to justify. Some observers have even asserted that popular distributed apps like Ethereum and Bitcoin now consume more electricity than entire small nations, just to keep track of the "truth".

Imagine running an app like Facebook or Twitter, using that same inefficient design? At Internet scale, distributed global consensus simply cannot be the right design choice. 

We've found a better way to get the same (or better) results, with much, much less electricity, and far more efficiency. That means you get more bang for your buck, and you don't need to burn our planet to get there.

But don't just take our word for it. We've just published our draft whitepapers, including a formal characterization of distributed systems, and a comparison between our agent-centric approach and the outmoded data-centric designs of years past. We'd love to get your feedback on them:

• Holo: Cryptocurrency Infrastructure for Global Scale and Stable Value (Whitepaper)
• Holochain: Scalable, Agent-Centric Distributed Computing (Whitepaper)

Holo is our name for a decentralised platform that runs dApps (aka Holochains), built using our open-source Holochain app framework. Writing natively distributed apps has never been easier, or more accessible to everyday developers. 

Our open source Holochain toolkit makes it easy to build all manner of natively-distributed apps, while leveraging framework-level strong crypto. It's a remarkably big improvement on the outdated “blockchain” designs that have come before us. Like Holo itself, Holochain doesn’t force you to live with expensive design decisions just to do something simple. Holochain still gives you all the powerful capabilities that people like about blockchains and cryptocurrencies, such as strong security, data privacy and protection, and cryptographically-verified identity systems. Holochain makes it easy to build apps with distributed computing, and holographic (decentralised) storage. It's way more efficient than blockchains, because Holochain doesn't force you to use expensive,  global consensus strategies that are overkill for 90% of distributed use cases.

Holochains are light-weight, agent-centric, and composable. With privacy-by-design at its core, the Holochain architecture puts you back in charge of your app's digital footprint, and the paths your data can take. And because Holochains are composable, you can rapidly work together with others to create shared data exchanges that can be trusted by all participants.

With the power of the decentralised Holo platform, you can easily run your Holochains across any number of nodes, with any level of compute and storage resources that you require. If your app only needs tiny amounts of these, you can tell it to only consume tiny amounts. If you need serious grunt, your app will get all the power it needs to power your next invention. 

Purchase one of our Holo boxes via our Indiegogo  Campaign, or install the Holo platform on your own existing infrastructure. Load up the Holochain for your app, and host your own origin node for the app and its data. Because you control your own local node, you have complete control over your identity, your data, and all the ways they become available in the world.

For complete control, you can run Holochains exclusively on your own hardware. Or you include any other hosts that you trust as well, so long as they are also running Holo.

And when it's time to scale up, you can easily buy the exact resources you need from the broader Holo community marketplace, at a fair, market-driven price. The amazing cryptocurrency that fuels the Holo platform is designed to reward people and systems that keep their promises and act with high integrity. So when you need to host mission-critical, high-availability Holochains, you can choose to buy premium resources with a proven record of service delivery. Or if you just want to run your latest inventions at scale, but as cheaply as possible, you can give Holo more leeway to curate from nodes in the network that will give you the best bang for your (crypto) bucks.

With Holo, you can sleep soundly, safe in the knowledge that your Holochains can run anywhere, at any scale, and will always respect your rules (and budget).

We call it integrity by design.

Our community is the heart of Holo!

Please leave us a comment, suggestion, constructive criticism, witticism, or challenge below.
If you have any questions about what we're up to, or our plans for Holo's future, please don't be shy. Ask away!

Your comments will be seen directly by our Holo core team.