The second half of 2025 was a period of structural transformation for Holochain, Holo, and Unyt. The results we delivered were significant. Holochain closed 2025 with a year defined by momentum—the integration of Kitsune2, a validation pipeline overhaul, and the launch of Wind Tunnel as the start of production-grade testing infrastructure. Holo launched an open-source Edge Node model—a leaner, more accessible approach to always-on hosting that anyone can run with a Docker container. Unyt began to deliver peer-to-peer payment rails capable of multi-currency accounting, blockchain bridging, and community-configurable economics.
The first months of 2026 have continued to benefit from increased coordination between Holochain, Holo, and Unyt, and a laser focus on delivery that included the HOT-HF Technical Migration Test. This reflects a concerted strategy put in motion late in 2025, and included: evolving working norms, new cultural commitments, operational refinements, and a more streamlined team. Combined, these efforts have already generated tangible results and momentum that we’ll carry into the rest of the year.
Here's what arrived in Q1 2026 which we also discussed in a recorded conversation:
Holochain: Unlocking New Reliability
The Holochain team spent the first quarter working in a close loop with the Unyt team. The foci included: testing Holochain with Wind Tunnel, testing and improving the Unyt app, and improving Holochain’s stability.
The highest visibility milestone was the switch from tx5, our WebRTC-based networking library, to Iroh. The Iroh library was specifically designed for peer-to-peer use cases and has quickly proven to more reliably create direct connections between peers (instead of relayed), and also loses fewer messages between peers. When combined with last year’s improvements on Holochain workflows and the integration of Kitsune, Iroh unlocked another level of reliability that moves beyond even the improved stability at the end of 2025.
That effort to ensure that apps more often work the way they should for end users involved a lot of unglamorous engineering: database handling, bug fixes, graceful recovery from connection failures, and better peer discovery.
Wind Tunnel, Holochain's distributed stress-testing environment, also scaled significantly in Q1. The team is now routinely running scenarios across 250 nodes, measuring sync time, spin-up speed, and a range of other performance metrics. With Docker containers and solid community participation, Holochain has now been tested on a larger network than ever before. The visualization layer continues to mature, and the results are now public. The next stage of maturity for Holochain will be to continue refining its behavior in the real world, where running distributed tests like the HOT-HF Technical Migration Test illuminates actual performance beyond even what robust automated testing alone can reveal.
In the next week, Holochain 0.6.1 will be released. This version contains some breaking changes from 0.6.0, which the team normally tries to avoid, but it contains crucial improvements to enable the Unyt app testing. Holochain 0.6.x will remain the stable version of Holochain for hApp developers while the Holochain team focuses on the development of Holochain 0.7. You can follow the test results for Wind Tunnel as they are produced, and keep an eye on progress as Wind Tunnel is upgraded to Holochain 0.7 and improvements are made.
More Building on Holochain
The Holochain ecosystem continues to show real momentum. Moss now has 17 tools in its library: chat, video conferencing, Kanban boards, decision-making, planning, whiteboard, and more, and adoption is picking up. A new player, Farm Hack, is beginning to incorporate these tools into their hardware and architecture to take advantage of distributed self hosting.
Flux and AD4M demonstrated live local AI transcription and summarization of conversations within a chat context, with none of the processing going to the cloud: audio gets sent to a node with GPU capability, transcribed locally, and returned to the chat.
A community developer built a Codex and Claude Code skill for Holochain app development — a sign that AI coding agents are now at a stage where you can reliably build hApps with them. As proof of this, Flowsta shipped a Holochain-based OAuth2 provider for privacy-respecting single sign-on, followed up with a document authorship claim tool, and opened useful developer libraries to the broader ecosystem. And Valichord is an emerging hApp and tool stack that seeks to address the reproducibility crisis in biomedical studies. It’s good to see people bringing their valuable ideas to life with the help of AI.
For anyone interested in keeping up with the latest goings-on in the Holochain ecosystem, the hAppenings community continues to serve as a crucial resource — not just a newsletter, but a maintained directory of Holochain projects, development groups, and ecosystem activity.
Holo: From Edge Nodes to the Browser
Holo has shipped nearly everything we planned in Q1, with a few additions. The last item, which slipped into Q2, was just completed: the HOT to HoloFuel Technical Migration Test.
Edge Nodes continue to be refined and the setup process made easier for the community to join the containerized foundation of the Holo Hosting infrastructure. In addition, we’ve introduced two new pieces of infrastructure that, together, bring us one step closer to Holochain apps being accessible to anyone with a web browser.
The first is a prototype version of the Holo Web Conductor, enabling users to interact with Holochain apps in a browser for the first time. The Web Conductor has been tested internally with Mewsfeed, a Twitter clone, and is moving toward external testing.
The second is the Joining Service prototype, a general-purpose tool for controlling who can join a Holochain application network. It's configurable for different use cases: as simple as an invitation code, as rigorous as passport verification, with email confirmation as an appropriate option for many groups. For the Web Conductor, it tells the browser where to find linkers and can gate access through identity verification. But the Joining Service is designed to be used by any app provider with different membrane requirements, and it's already been integrated into Unyt for configuring participation membranes and KYC levels across different Unyt instances.
Holo has continued to deliver amidst a rapidly shifting regulatory landscape. A detailed post addressing key frameworks and regulations, MiCA, the UK FCA's digital asset framework, Gibraltar's DLT regulations, and how these impact the HOT-to-HoloFuel technical migration. This was followed up with a post last week that focused on the upcoming CLARITY Act and its implications for mutual credit currencies.
Unyt: Building a New Economic System
Unyt started Q4 2025 with a promise of bi-weekly releases that would build piece-by-piece towards a crypto-accounting economic system. They delivered, and in doing so built the app used by Holo for the HOT to HoloFuel Technical Migration Test that was delivered in April.
The Unyt team delivered significant new functionality through the end of 2025 and into the early part of 2026. Blockchain bridging enabled Unyt to mirror EVM-based tokens as a configurable Layer 2 space. Oracles brought blockchain token and forex pricing data into Unyt apps pulling in market data from external sources. Configurable membranes gave communities fine-grained control over participation requirements, now integrated with the Joining Service for KYC at varying levels of rigor. And smoother payment workflows refined the day-to-day experience of moving value within Unyt. Atomic multi-currency trades allow two parties to send one or more units in one direction in exchange for one or more units in the other, in other words, a direct peer-to-peer transaction with no exchange or intermediary required. The team isn't ready to discuss all of them publicly yet, but this is foundational infrastructure for revenue-generating financial applications powered by Unyt.
Though we had hoped to finish building data migration and recovery tools by the end of March, they haven't been released yet. However, much of the underlying work is well under way including mechanisms for carrying balances across software versions, chain restoration, and assisted recovery for corrupted states. The near term priorities are focused on bugs,improvements, and incorporating other learnings from the HOT-HoloFuel Technical Migration Test.
HOT-HoloFuel Technical Migration Test
Many of the above components converged later in the month, as the HOT-to-HoloFuel Technical Migration Test entered live testing with a small set of community testers before expanding in mid-April to a much larger set of volunteers. In essence, this was a test that involved the Unyt, Holo Hosting, and Holochain organizations.
Approximately 80 testers participated in the test and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive.
“Overall, the Unyt application works wonderfully; it's very fast for sending, receiving, and swap to HOT/HF… Thank you for allowing me to be part of this great community and for helping us create a new economic model.” –Emmanuel Fierro
“The ability to send value at near-zero cost was extremely impressive… This experience gave me an impression similar to what I felt when I made my first Bitcoin transfer. . . but this time through a much more advanced and user-centered experience. In summary, I believe Holo has genuinely strong potential in this area.” –Cryptobagwell“Ok team, whatever magic you drummed up . . . you should concentrate it and sell it! Sooo fast and seamless. Coupon approved in ~ 3 secs! Bravo! Let’s go!” –Joe
Beyond these kudos the response was exactly what you'd want from a test: testers surfaced UI issues the team hadn't caught, made suggestions for more intuitive flows, and found bugs.
The Unyt, Holo, and Holochain teams worked in parallel, rapidly iterating on feedback, triaging issues, and shipping real-time improvements.
If you haven’t already done so, please join more than 450 community testers and sign up to participate in future tests.
What’s Next
Stepping back, the accomplishments in this first quarter, across all three organizations, are striking: Holochain delivered strong reliability improvements, Holo began enabling Holochain apps to be accessed from the browser, and Unyt iterated through improved version after improved version thanks to a phenomenal group of testers.And there’s more coming in Q2 that builds on this momentum. For Holochain the focus is on building on the upcoming v0.6.1 release as we charge toward some bigger improvements with v0.7.0. Holo and Unyt are working side-by-side again this quarter to mature the components needed for the HOT-HoloFuel Technical Migration.
As always, we're grateful to all the folks who are building with us: community, supporters, and, not least, testers.
