I want to share the Holochain Foundation’s evolving strategic approach to our subsidiary organizations, Holo, and Unyt.
Strategic work always involves paying attention to the match between your efforts, and where the world is ready to receive those efforts. Since our inception there has always been a small group of supporters who have understood the potential and need for the kind of deep p2p infrastructure that we are building, which allows for all kinds of un-intermediated direct interactions and transactions of all types. But at this moment in time we are seeing a new convergence.
As Holochain is maturing significantly, the main-stream world is also maturing into understanding the need for p2p networks and processes. As my colleague Madelynn Martiniere says: “we are meeting the moment and the moment is meeting us.”
And there’s a key domain in which this is happening: the domain of value transfer.
The Unyt Opportunity
As you know, the foundation created a subsidiary, Unyt, to focus on building HoloFuel, the accounting system for Holo to use for its Hosting platform. But it turns out that the tooling Unyt built has a far broader application than we had initially realized. This is part of the convergence, and also a huge opportunity.
Unyt’s tooling turns out to be what people are calling “payment-rails”: generalized tooling for value tracking, and because it’s built on Holochain, it’s already fully p2p. This is part of the convergence. There is a huge opportunity for this technology to bring the deep qualitative value that p2p provides: increased transparency, agency, reduced cost, & privacy. And also in huge volumes: when talking about digital payments and transactions you count in the trillions.
The implications are huge, and they need and deserve the focus of the Foundation and our resources so we can fully develop the opportunity ahead of us.
Interactions with Integrity: Powered by Holochain
Our original mission was to provide the underlying cryptographic fabric to make decentralized computing both easy and real - and ultimately, at a scale that could have a global impact.
That mission remains intact. The evolution we’re sharing today is not only directly connected to our original strategy, and a logical extension of it, but are ones that we believe will - over time - substantially increase the scale of and opportunities for anyone and everyone within the Holochain ecosystem.
When we introduced the idea of Holochain and Holo to the world in December of 2017, our goal was to provide a technology infrastructure that allowed people to own their own data, control their identities, choose how they connect themselves and their applications to the online world, and intrinsic to all of the above, interact and transact directly with each other as producers and consumers of value.
The foundation of the Holochain ecosystem has thus always required establishing a payment system where every transaction is an interaction with integrity: value is supported by productive capacity, validated on local chains (vs. global ledgers) by a unit of accounting - in our case, HoloFuel - and value and supply is grounded by a real-world service with practical value.
The Holochain Foundation entity charged with developing and delivering the technology infrastructure for this payment system is Unyt Accounting.
For almost a year now, the team at Unyt has been quietly working hard to develop the payment rails software that will permit users to build and deploy unique currencies (including HoloFuel), allow those currencies to circulate and interact, and ensure the integrity of every transaction. As it turns out, we got more than we bargained for, in the best possible way.
Meaning: in Unyt, we have software that not only enables HoloFuel, but we can see a brilliant way to link into both the blockchain and crypto world, and also the non-crypto world. As Holochain matures, with the application of Unyt technology, we see a major opportunity in the peer-to-peer payments space, and a chance to lead the non-financial transaction space.
These are, objectively, huge markets, as Unyt products and tools are not only aimed squarely at solving real-world crypto accounting and payment challenges, but will combine to create the infrastructure needed to launch HoloFuel, and additionally address multiple real-world use cases for anyone interested in high-integrity, decentralized, digital interactions.
Given Unyt’s progress, we arrived at a point where it became clear to everyone on our leadership team that it was time to make an important strategic decision about where to best devote our focus, time, and resources.
Strategic Decisions and Our Path Forward
Here’s where we landed:
When we reorganized Holo Ltd. last year, it was because we wanted to spur growth, and felt having a focus on a commercial application could expand the number of end users. But, it also put us into competition with some of the largest and best-capitalized tech companies on the planet.
We haven’t gotten enough traction yet for this to be our sole strategy. As part of our ongoing evaluation over the last months, the Holo dev team pursued an exploration of a very different approach - both technical and structural - to deploying Holochain always-on nodes.
Holo is calling it Edge Node, an open-source, OCI-compliant container image that can be run on any device, physical or virtual, to serve as an always-on-node for any hApp .
Today, Edge Node is available on GitHub for technically savvy folks to use. You can run the Docker container image or opt to install via the ISO onto HoloPorts or any other hardware
What’s different about this experiment is that it appeals to a much wider audience - those familiar with running docker containers, rather than the smaller audience who know Nix. And we’re releasing it now, as open-source, and actively seeking immediate feedback from the community on how this might evolve and contribute to Holo’s goals.
Second, it is equally clear we need to accelerate the timeline for Unyt. Unyt’s software underpins the accounting infrastructure necessary to create and launch HoloFuel, and subsequently allow owners of HOT to swap into it. More broadly, the multiple types of connectivity Unyt can foster have enormous potential to influence the size, growth, and overall value of Holochain - it is the substrate of peer-to-peer local currencies, and the foundation for future DePIN alliances.
This acceleration is already under way - in fact, Unyt has released its first community currency app, Circulo, which is meant for real-world use but also acts as proof-of-concept for the broader Unyt ecosystem.
Third, and finally, the Holochain Foundation will continue to focus on the stability and resilience of the Holochain codebase, prioritize key technical features required for the currency swap execution, and remain at the center of all our entities to ensure cohesion and coordination.
Leadership Transition
As part of the next stage of Holo’s evolution, I want to share an important leadership update.
Mary Camacho, who has served as Executive Director of Holo since 2018, will be stepping down from that role, and I will be stepping in. Mary will continue to support Holo during this transition, particularly in guiding financial and strategic planning. We are deeply grateful for her years of leadership, steady guidance, and dedication to Holo’s vision.
At the same time, we also thank Alastair Ong, who has served as a Director of Holo, for his contributions on the board. We wish him the very best in his next endeavors.
These transitions mark a natural shift in leadership that allows Holo to move forward with renewed focus, alongside ongoing collaboration with Unyt and the wider Holochain ecosystem.
Looking Ahead
From the outset, we knew we were undertaking an extraordinary challenge. In conceiving of and developing Holochain, we set out to compete with some of the largest, best-resourced, and most powerful companies in the world. No part of what we have done, or intend to do, has been easy.
In many ways Holochain has always been a future-looking technology that users had difficulty fully appreciating and adopting at scale. Now, the world seems to have caught up to us, and is interested in implementing peer-to-peer networks and processes away from centralized structures.
When we formed Unyt to build the software infrastructure to permit the creation and accounting for HoloFuel, we also caught up to the world: A Major Opportunity Emerges(the volume of digital payments and transactions last year alone are measurable in the trillions).
We’ve spent a long time working to deliver on our commitments to our community, and there is much still to do.
As challenging as it is not to have crossed the finish line yet, it’s exciting to see it appearing on the horizon. We continue to experiment with how to best expand the potential for Holo hosting. And with Unyt, what we’re proposing to do here - if we are successful - is significantly grow the scale, potential, optionality, and value of every aspect of the Holochain ecosystem.
For those interested, please take the time to watch our most recent livestream, where we talk about this evolution and the opportunities it represents for all of us.
We have a lot to look forward to, and we look forward to continuing to work closely with our most valuable, and reliable, resource: you, the members of the Holochain community.
