In the open-source world, there is a well-known dilemma: it’s very difficult to find funding for deep infrastructure-level projects. We knew, when envisioning Holochain, what we wanted to bring into the world — the capacity for groups of people to create digital spaces in which to engage without the need for any intermediaries or web servers. We wanted it to work with nothing but the computers of the very groups of people wanting to engage.

Well, that counts as a deep open-source infrastructure-level project. So we came up with a strategy to create a company that needed Holochain’s new infrastructural capacity, and could market its business proposition and plan. But instead of being owned by venture capital, it would be owned by an open-source foundation on behalf of all the eventual users of that infrastructure.

That vision led us to launch Holo as a distributed cloud hosting company for Holochain apps, that would also use Holochain itself to manage that cloud infrastructure, and do the value accounting between hosts and app providers. This was a complex and tall order.  And so for the past years, all of us in the Holo/Holochain world have been driving primarily to meet Holo’s needs, as we’ve been implementing Holochain itself. Admittedly, it’s taken us significantly longer than we initially thought to build out the depth of the Holochain feature set, along with the complex infrastructure that Holo needed to offer generalized Holochain-based cloud hosting. It’s been hard going. In the meantime, the world has also changed around us, revealing new demands of where and how Holochain actually wants to be used in today’s market, demands that are different from what we initially envisioned.

To meet these changes, and to increase our capacity to deliver, we are updating our strategy, which means a significant organizational restructuring. You can read the announcement of this restructuring on the Holo.host press site.

But what does this mean more specifically for the Holochain Foundation? Foremost, the Foundation will move from being a passive holder of the Holochain intellectual property, on behalf of the community, into being the active operational entity supporting and managing the Holochain development team.

Part of our “coming of age” is realizing that we can’t do everything we might like. Focus matters. Our strategic plan for delivering on our mission of “fostering the evolution and thriving of the Holochain framework and related ecosystems”, begins with just one thing: The stability and reliability of Holochain, such that it can be deployed as industrial-strength, mission-critical infrastructure by commercial projects as well as our community stakeholders. What this means in practice is testing, testing, testing! This includes:

  1. Continued build-out of our “Wind Tunnel” performance testing framework so that we can verify that Holochain’s operating envelope, across each one of its features, meets or exceeds the demands of the specific projects currently bringing Holochain applications to market.
  2. Ensuring the sufficiency of testing code coverage of each of Holochain’s key features and undertaking any refactors necessary to bring them in line with our stakeholder’s needs.
  3. Upgrading our release patterns so that stakeholders delivering mission-critical apps can conditionally enable the more experimental and not-fully-tested features, while those stakeholders who are on the bleeding edge can help develop and test those very features.

We believe that the Holochain Foundation’s coming-of-age shifts us into delivering on our mission by serving our stakeholders better. We are deeply committed to our partners and ecosystem stakeholders that are currently delivering or developing Holochain apps, both the newer ones like the Volla and its Messages app for the new Quintus Volla Phone, data provenance solutions from Kwaxala, verified data for semi-fungbile token solutions including the recently released Jade City vaults, decentralized game data for esports, the new Visible Verification project, and the a project with Carbistry in the voluntary carbon market domain; and also to those partners who’ve been with us for a long time, like Darksoil Studio, Humm Hive, Neighbourhoods, Coasys, Lightningrod Labs, Carbon Farm Network, Valueflows, and others; and of course, supporting the features needed by the reorganized Holo and HoloFuel organizations. We are also preparing for larger-scale adoption of Holochain solutions in 2025, including collaborations with major players in the industrial supply chain and media industries.

As part of the reorganization and living into our commitment to focus, I will be stepping in as Executive Director of the Holochain Foundation. This will allow our current Executive Director, Mary Camacho, to concentrate on Holo’s new direction, as well as her passion of enabling commercial projects both directly and via new structures within the Foundation.

There’s much more in store for the Foundation going forward, especially around expanded and more formal structures for stakeholder involvement and engagement in Holochain’s development. This will take us a while to roll out, but you can expect more details in the next months. If your work depends on Holochain and you have feedback for what you would like to see from the Foundation going forward, please email me and Paul at feedback2024@holochain.org [Editor: we have changed this address since publication; please try this new address if you couldn't get through before].

Thanks for being with us as we grow up and into our next phase.

– Eric Harris-Braun

PS: We’ve been working on an update to the Holochain White Paper this year, and it’s finally published! It makes the claim for a practical Byzantine fault tolerant system for everyday use, as distinct from systems that are robust but costly in practice. It’s accompanied by another paper, Players of Ludos, which tells the story of how Holochain works through the activities of a group of nomadic board game players.

Cover photo by Anton Sobotyak on Unsplash