We recently hosted what will be the first of many livestream events for everyone in our community, a series we’re calling Holochain Horizon (for those who want to go to the primary source, here’s a link to that conversation).

Here, I want to do three things:

  • Provide both context for, and a summary of, this first conversation – especially as it gave an opportunity for many of you to hear directly from Madelynn Martiniere for the first time, who recently [DATE] joined our board and is providing direct support to the leadership team and broad community as we move forward and build out our ecosystem
  • Identify where we are right now as an organization – we’ve been working hard, for years, on an incredibly ambitious project: finding a path to building out open-source tech in a way that's actually viable in the world. While significant challenges remain, we benefit from having a clear picture of the often hard choices we have to make in order to make good on the promises we’ve made to both our community, and ourselves
  • And finally, having first written directly about the organizational shifts needed to provide our developers and community with the time, and space, necessary to deliver on our commitments (here) in November 2024, I want to offer some specifics about what lies ahead – which, while I am admittedly biased, I am genuinely excited about

ONE: Foundation Forward 

I began the call by characterizing myself – accurately – as a little nervous, partially because it was our first such event as the Foundation, and partially because I was and remain genuinely excited about the direction these key decisions have led us to.

At the highest level, as I’ve said, it means operationalizing the Holochain Foundation itself – a shift from IP stewardship to active and direct involvement and management.   This allows the Foundation to hold coherence for all our stakeholders, internal and external, to benefit from a strategic allocation of resources so that we can accelerate toward appropriately phased delivery.

Back in November I wrote that “part of our coming of age is realizing that we can’t do everything we might like. Focus matters.” From a technology infrastructure perspective, that means strategically advancing the capability, and durability, of Holochain. 

As Madelynn and I discussed on the call, we clearly recognize the need to engage with our community and like-minded partners via formalized processes that will migrate one-off engagements to defined projects that benefit everyone by advancing the infrastructure itself. 

Madelynn has a lifetime of experience in building healthy and robust technology ecosystems, and practically speaking, that means much of her role is to continuously iterate on improving surface-areas of engagement for all types of folks adopting Holochain, from individual developers, to enterprises and organizations looking for robust decentralized solutions to tough problems. A big part of that is engagement and communication, and as Madelyn herself said, her role is to ask, “how do we create processes and pathways for the community to be in deeper dialogue with us about what it is that they're building? How can we best support that? How do we engage them in actual development?”

So far, the concrete steps we’ve taken in bringing the Foundation forward include strengthening the technical team, along with a corresponding improvement in release structure and quality, and enhanced transparency, as embodied by our operational roadmap (which you can see here) to provide the community with a clearly delineated roadmap showing the scoping, planning, and evolution of our ongoing work.

For our community, the takeaway should be clear: the Foundation’s leadership, and the organization itself, are orienting around proactive engagement to move us – all of us – from the strategic to the tactical. 

TWO: Where Are We Now?

On the call, I made a plain but accurate observation: “to build out open-source tech in a way

that's actually viable in the world… is a hard problem.” 

From an organizational perspective, we’re evolving to meet the world as it is becoming. As I previously wrote, this means operationalizing the Foundation to ensure that while we’re always mindful of our ambitions, we remain connected and committed to action. In turn, that means constant and deliberate self-interrogation, making sure we have the right resources delivered to solve for the most important problems.

We talked about it at length in the livestream, but a clear example and core initiative for us is the continued build-out of our “Wind Tunnel” performance testing framework. One of the conundrums of technology is that while it sometimes appears there is unlimited capital to build out certain ideas (it is hard to observe without jealousy the trillions of dollars that have been dumped into AI), there is proportionately much less patience. Distributed technologies, by their nature, demand economic patience as they’re a half step slower to commercialize as the very decentralization creates different economic incentive structures.  From a performance perspective, decentralized systems also have a different profile due to their architecture. 

This is what makes Wind Tunnel so important: we want (and developers need) to be able to verify that Holochain’s operating envelope will meet the demands of Holochain applications. And that's what Wind Tunnel can do. It allows developers to create a scenario to drive a network of Holochain nodes, see what happens, record the rates at which data is synchronized (or any other parameter they want to measure, like DHT synchronization speeds, CPU usage, bandwidth usage across different nodes, etc.) and have the metrics reported. 

THREE: Where We’re Going

Having shifted the structure of our organization, and as we continue to evolve and direct our resources at our highest-priority opportunities, you can expect to see some exciting developments in the near term. 

In particular, in our past configuration we spent a significant amount of time working on developing the Holochain app and infrastructure necessary to support HoloFuel. Effecting the conversion of HOT into HoloFuel – a mutual credit currency anchored in the value created by Holo hosting - has, from the beginning, been a stated goal. 

Though we already knew the concept of HoloFuel had a much broader application as a pattern, we also realized that we could implement a generalized version for mutual credit currencies that other decentralized infrastructure projects could use, while also creating more value for current HOT holders. 

Accounting for value flow and creating a fabric for establishing rules and systems to support and govern these flows, enables networks, communities, economies and cultures to grow and thrive. Recognizing this opportunity led to our strategic decision to create Unyt, a separate subsidiary organization designed to implement a generalized version for mutual credit currencies that decentralized infrastructure projects could use, while also creating more value for current HOT holders. 

While Unyt is in its early days, they’re getting close to being able to launch beta versions of their multi-unit accounting framework and open them to our community for testing via a scavenger hunt. I won’t say too much more here about Unyt, but expect to hear more from them soon. 

More broadly, we’re working hard on supporting this and other key initiatives at the Foundation that we believe will not only represent significant milestones, but genuinely put us on a path to delivering on the vision we’ve had, and shared, since Holochain’s inception.

Thanks to everyone for your continued support, and confidence.

Eric