What is Holochain?

With news of Jim Cook, the CFO of Mozilla and the co-founder of Netflix, releasing a testimonial on YouTube, Holo has been attracting a lot of attention in the cryptocurrency market and the blockchain industry.

But as a project, Holo is probably one of the most misunderstood projects in the industry. Not many people know what the project goals are and what the team is trying to achieve. To that effect, let us take a closer look at what Holo is and what it intends to do.

Holochain

The main aim of Holochain is to create a decentralised web. Period. This end-goal is something that many cryptocurrency projects have in common, but the endorsements and support that Holochain is receiving is what sets it apart.

The Holochain ecosystem is also, an incubator platform that allows developers to create decentralised applications. The incubatory platform that Holochain provides is similar to the Ethereum platform.

Holochain aims to do this by providing a blockchain with all the advantages of the original one but with none of its disadvantages. Towards the same the Holochain aims to remove/add the following in its version of the distributed ledger;

Remove Consensus

The Holochain protocol has removed the need for consensus. Instead, the chain matches hashes. Which has cut down the amount of time it takes to process a transaction by more than half.

Compact Blockchain

One of the issues that many people face with the blockchain is the device limitation it imposes on users. Because the software is quite heavy and power hungry, only certain computers can run it.

To change this, the Holochain is a more compact version of the blockchain which can be run even on smartphones.

More Accessible

The Holochain ecosystem is similar to the Ethereum platform in the sense that it is a platform for the development of decentralised application. The blockchain industry is a very exclusive industry on a whole and Holochain is moving towards making it more inclusive.

A way that the Holochain ecosystem has done that is in the fact that dapps development can be done in Javascript and Lisp. Other platforms like Ethereum, run on Solidity. And developers who use Solidity are a very niche crowd.

Another way that Holochain is making the blockchain industry more accessible to everybody is through its hardware product; Holo Ports. Holo Ports is a small box that can host the Holo peer-to-peer network. This particular product from Holochain is aimed at people who aren’t too technically sound but still want to host their own network.

Roadmap and Partnerships

The roadmap for the Holochain project has many things lined up for delivery in the last two quarters of 2018. Holo is building its environment and ecosystem, but as it builds it has its first version up and running.

The network is currently in its testing phase and all the Holo ports are also being tested for speed, reliability and overall scalability.

Partnerships

Holochain, as a company, has gotten endorsements from multiple companies and industry big names. The most notable of these are the endorsements from Jim Cook, the Mozilla’s CFO and Co-Founder of Netflix.

The verbal endorsement from Jim Cook on a video on YouTube hinted towards a long term partnership. In the event that this partnership fructifies into something more, it will be the mother of all deals ever struck for the cryptocurrency industry.

The HOT Token

The HOT token is the Holochain ecosystem’s temporary token. It is an ERC20 Standard token. The only difference between tokens on other platforms and this one is that the HOT token is not the ecosystem’s native token. It is rather the token that the company used for its ICO and continues to use until the ecosystem is ready.

And since Holochain is an incubator platform for decentralised applications, the chain also allows the applications on the platform to create and use their own tokens.

The HOT token is ranked 50th in the market, according to coinmarketcap. The highest value that the HOT token has ever held is $0.0019 USD. The current value of the HOT token is $0.00104 USD.