Holochain’s features and performance have matured enough that we’ve set the date for our Beta release and will publish a release candidate for Holochain Beta by December 15, 2022.

Given the large risks that come with releasing crypto projects prematurely, or failing to ensure sound underlying fundamentals, Holochain has taken a more conservative and methodical approach. At this point, we have five years of development, during which we’ve built, tested, refined, explored new territory, learned a lot, and occasionally gone back to the drawing board. And we’re excited to finally have a solid enough platform to announce that we’ve crossed the maturity threshold for release.

To confirm our software and technology is sound, Holochain has been undergoing a security audit of its cryptography, codebase, and integrity model. We've engaged  Least Authority, the same firm that audited Ethereum, Ethereum 2.0, Filecoin and many other projects with sophisticated decentralized architectures. We look forward to sharing the results once the audit is complete.

In addition to hired auditors, our community of developers have worked tirelessly on building and releasing apps built on Holochain, and have provided critical feedback which has helped us address feature requirements, reliability challenges, and usability hurdles such that we are assured Holochain now has all the vital elements for building real Web3 apps.

In December we will deliver a release candidate to our community so they can hammer against it with their applications and automated testing to confirm the January release of a full Holochain Beta.

Holochain is a scalable peer-to-peer application framework which provides secure validation while still offering near real-time coordination capabilities at large scales. It does not suffer from the scalability constraints of blockchain and global consensus. As such, it provides exactly the solutions needed today: the data integrity and performance required to support Web3’s goal to leave centralized corporate servers behind.

Basic Features of Holochain Alpha

  • Private cryptographically signed chains where each agent records their immutable history of actions
  • Publishing to a distributed hash table (DHT) for shared visibility of state
  • Data integrity guarantees enforced by randomized validators
  • Linking of data to utilize the DHT as a graph database
  • Strong eventual consistency and guaranteed data liveness through rapid publishing and self-healing gossip on the DHT
  • Fully peer-to-peer networking leveraging an agent’s public key to enable self-validating network addresses
  • Enabling custom P2P applications, with your choice of UI approach
  • Scaling by isolating each application into its own DHT and P2P network

Advanced Features included in Holochain Beta

  • Cross-Platform launcher for Holochain with built-in app store for installing and running new decentralized apps
  • Breaking of DHT storage and validation into shards so large-scale apps only incur a small workload
  • Mutual countersigning of actions to enable atomic state changes across multiple agent chains
  • M of N countersigning to enable apps to implement lightweight consensus for selected data elements
  • Innovative data compression to accelerate node-to-node gossip via quantized chunks of space and time
  • Apps can now spawn new child applets with private workspaces
  • Stable validation and data structures with flexible accessors and runtime functions
  • Enable delayed or recurring tasks with scheduler
  • External hash references to integrate data and logic across apps, DHTs and even other chains and frameworks
  • Full Web3 feature set, enabling replacement of all those Web2 surveillance apps

Request to our Dev Community: Now is the time to make sure you have automated testing to put our release candidate through its paces. We need to uncover any final reliability issues or performance barriers. Please build more automated tests!

Resources for testing your apps:

  • Tryorama: Holochain’s full-featured, JavaScript-based, scenario testing framework for your apps. GitHub | NPM | Documentation | API reference
  • Sweetest: a Rust-based integration testing package used to test Holochain itself but is also popular for app scenario testing. You can use it by including the `holochain` crate with the `test_utils` feature flag enabled in your test project. Crates | Documentation

A big THANK YOU goes out to our community and supporters for your patience. We know many of you have followed our project for a long time. In light of the chaos of more recent collapses and failures in the crypto market, we hope you understand why we’ve taken special care in our build process before releasing.

What This Announcement Means & What it Does Not Mean

  • Holochain is not the Holo hosting network. This message is not about HOT.
  • This announcement does not relate to HoloFuel nor the Holo Token.
  • Holo will use this Beta release to build and launch the Holo hosting platform.
  • We will continue to optimize performance and add planned features to Holochain even after Beta launch.

Holochain and Holo are Hiring

We are hiring developers and are specifically looking for coders who love to dig deep into the low level code, troubleshoot, and debug. Great communication skills are a must. Follow the links below for more information or to apply.