Holo Green Paper
Created by:

Arthur Brock, David Atkinson, Emaline Friedman, Eric
Harris-Braun, Erin McGuire, Jean M Russell,
Nicholas Perrin, Nicolas Luck, Will Harris-Braun

December 2017(updated April 2021 by Arthur Brock & Mary Camacho)Legal disclaimer
Please note that we are in the process of undertaking a legal and regulatory analysis of our token
sale model and the intended utility of tokens and HoloFuel on the underlying platform. Following
the conclusion of this analysis, we may decide to amend the intended utility of tokens and/or
HoloFuel in order to ensure compliance with any legal or regulatory requirements to which weare subject. To the extent that we make any such changes, we shall update the Green Paper andpublish a notice on our website together with the latest version of the Green Paper. It is yourresponsibility to regularly check our website for any such notices and updates.
This green paper is for information purposes only and may be subject to change. We cannot
guarantee the accuracy of the statements made or conclusions reached in this green paper and we
expressly disclaim all representations and warranties (whether express or implied by statute orotherwise) whatsoever, including but not limited to:●●●

Any representations or warranties relating to merchantability, ﬁtness for a particular purpose,
suitability, wage, title or non-infringement;
That the contents of this document are accurate and free from any errors; andThat such contents do not infringe any third party rights.

We shall have no liability for damages of any kind arising out of the use, reference to or reliance on
the contents of this green paper, even if advised of the possibility of damages arising.
This green paper may contain references to third party data and industry publications. As far as weare aware, the information reproduced in this green paper is accurate and that the estimates andassumptions contained herein are reasonable. However, we oﬀer no assurances as to the accuracy orcompleteness of this data. Although information and data reproduced in this green paper are
believed to have been obtained from reliable sources, we have not independently veriﬁed any of theinformation or data from third party sources referred to in this green paper or ascertained theunderlying assumptions relied upon by such sources.
As of the date of publication of this green paper, Holo’s ERC20 Tokens have no known or intended
future use (other than the anticipated conversion on Holo’s application in the form of HoloFuel).
No promises of future performance or value are or will be made with respect to Holo’s ERC20 Tokens,
including no promise of inherent value, no promise of continuing payments, and no guarantee that
Holo’s ERC20 Tokens will hold any particular value. Unless prospective participants fully understandand accept the nature of Holo’s business and the potential risks associated with the acquisition,
storing and transfer of Holo’s ERC20 Tokens, they should not participate in the Holo ERC20 Token
Sale. Holo’s ERC20 Tokens are not being structured or sold as securities. Holo’s ERC20 Tokens hold norights and confer no interests in the equity of Holo. Holo’s ERC20 Tokens are sold with an intended
future functionality on the Holo application and all proceeds received during the Token Sale (referred
to as an Initial Community Oﬀer in the green paper) may be spent freely by Holo on the developmentof its business and the underlying technological infrastructure.

2

This green paper does not constitute a prospectus or disclosure document and is not an oﬀer to sell,
nor the solicitation of any oﬀer to buy any investment or ﬁnancial instrument in any jurisdiction. Holo’s
ERC20 Tokens should not be acquired for speculative or investment purposes with the expectation of
making an investment return.
No regulatory authority has examined or approved any of the information set out in this green paper.
No such action has or will be taken under the laws, regulatory requirements or rules of any
jurisdiction. The publication, distribution or dissemination of this green paper does not imply thatapplicable laws or regulatory requirements have been complied with.
Participation in Holo’s ERC20 Token Sale carries substantial risk and may involve special risks that
could lead to a loss of all or a substantial portion of your contribution. Further information about therisks of participating in the Token Sale are set out in the Token Sale T&Cs. Please ensure that you have
read, understood and are prepared to accept the risks of participating in the Token Sale before
sending a contribution to us.
The Token Sale and/or Holo Tokens could be impacted by regulatory action, including potential
restrictions on the ownership, use, or possession of such tokens. Regulators or other competentauthorities may demand that we revise the mechanics of the Token Sale and/or the functionality ofHolo Tokens in order to comply with regulatory requirements or other governmental or businessobligations. Nevertheless, we believe we are taking commercially reasonable steps to ensure that the
Token Sale mechanics and issue of Holo Tokens do not violate applicable laws and regulations.

CAUTION REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS
This green paper contains forward-looking statements or information (collectively “forward-looking
statements”) that relate to our current expectations of future events. In some cases, theseforward-looking statements can be identiﬁed by words or phrases such as “may”, “will”, “expect”,“anticipate”, “aim”, “estimate”, “intend”, “plan”, “seek”, “believe”, “potential”, “continue”, “is/are likely to” or
the negative of these terms, or other similar expressions intended to identify forward-looking
statements. We have based these forward-looking statements on current projections about future
events and ﬁnancial trends that we believe may aﬀect our ﬁnancial condition, results of operations,business strategy, ﬁnancial needs, or the results of the Token Sale.
In addition to statements relating to the matters set out here, this green paper contains
forward-looking statements related to Holo’s proposed operating model. The model speaks to our
objectives only, and is not a forecast, projection or prediction of future results of operations.
Forward-looking statements are based on certain assumptions and analysis made by Holo in light of
its experience and perception of historical trends, current conditions and expected future
developments and other factors it believes are appropriate, and are subject to risks and uncertainties.
Although the forward-looking statements contained in this green paper are based upon what we
believe are reasonable assumptions, there are risks, uncertainties, assumptions, and other factors
which could cause Holo’s actual results, performances, achievements and/or experiences to diﬀermaterially from the expectations expressed, implied, or perceived in forward-looking statements.
Given such risks, prospective participants in the Token Sale should not place undue reliance on theseforward-looking statements.

3

Table of Contents
Legal disclaimer

2

Table of Contents

4

Context: Bridging Crypto to Mainstream

5

Introduction
Overview of Holo Ecosystem

66

1. Tech Innovations: Scalable Applications 9
Scalable dApps
9
Comparing Blockchain and Holochain9
2. Tech Innovations: Hosting P2P Apps for
Mainstream Users
10
3. Currency Innovation: Double-Entry
Crypto-Accounting
12
Cryptocurrency: Comparing Crypto-coins
to Crypto-accounting Credits
12
Crypto-Accounting rather than
Cryptocurrency
13
Asset Backed
13
No tokens. No coins.
14
Countersigned Transactions
14
Breathing Currency Supply
15
Value Stable — Not Value Static
15
Participating with HoloFuel
16
Hosting System — Roles andResponsibilities
16
General Purpose Transfers andTransactions
18
Selective Automation: Holo Governance 19
4. Business Model Innovation: Leveraging
Excess Capacity Using Sharing Economy
Principles
20
The Larger Value Proposition
20
The Revenue Model for Holo21
We are Growing an Ecosystem
22

Cloud Hosting Size and GrowthMonthly Transaction Volume(Currency)

23
24

5. Funding Innovation: Bonding ICO with
Crowdfunding
24
Crowdfunding Campaign
25
Private Sale
25
Hosting Credits Exclusive to Hosts andDevelopers — Not Transferable Before
Launch of Holo25
ICO — Initial Community Oﬀering
25
Transferable ERC20 Token Sale
(Outside Restricted Countries)
25
Design of Solidity Smart Contracts 26
Sale Mechanics
26
ERC20 Token Distribution
27
Daily Distribution
27
The Future27
Budget Allocation by amount raised 27
Holo Development Roadmap andTimelines28
Why Holo’s Strategy Will Work
28
Appendix and Links
Appendix: Criticisms and Objections“You obviously don’t understand‘Trustless’ currencies.”“But you have to use consensus!”
Appendix: More on Holochain
Holochain delivery roadmap*
Appendix: Holochain Upgrades
Appendix: Security of HoloFuel

30
30

Glossary

36

30
31
31
32
32
33

4

Context: Bridging Crypto to Mainstream
Holo is a bridge to link our advanced crypto technology, Holochain, and everyday users. This
document explains how Holo works and the business model and funding that support it. Holochain
delivers on the dreams of making decentralized computing easy and real. It provides the underlying
cryptographic fabric to maintain data integrity across unlimited peers without requiring consensus.
Integrity without consensus means:● immediate and eﬃcient processing,● no proof-of-work,● no proof-of-stake,● no energy wasted on mining,● no bottlenecks nor global delays.
In fact, Holochain is so eﬃcient that you can run over 50 full nodes on a cell phone or a $35 Raspberry
Pi computer. Holochain even enables scalable crypto-accounting to build new generations ofasset-backed and value-stable cryptocurrencies.
Programmers can leverage our RAD tools (Rapid Application Development) to quickly build fully P2P
web applications designed to operate on the scale of Twitter or Facebook with no centralized data
centers or infrastructure. Each user just brings their own device to share a small amount of computing
and storage.
Holochain meets the demands of people who want to:● own their own data,● control their identity,● have automatic backups,● customize their user experience,● choose how to connect their applications,● decide with whom to share their private information,● and transact without dependence on banks or governments.
Despite all these beneﬁts, people don't adopt technology just because it’s good. Most stick to theconvenient and comfortable. So, that's why we're launching Holo.
Only some people are ready to install and experiment with next-gen crypto software like Holochain,but for the apps built on this vanguard to be viable, they still need to reach mainstream Internet users.
Holo lets people use their web browser and existing payment systems to interact with decentralized
crypto-apps and currencies, providing a bridge from Holochain's fully peer-to-peer world of the
future back to the semi-centralized world of today.
Early adopters can use a HoloPort to host their own apps and data and earn HoloFuel for sharing
extra space and computing power to host apps for others. Instead of burning computation on mining,
Holo Hosts get paid for providing hosting to mainstream users who just use their browser instead of
installing Holochain.
Most crypto projects tout the fulﬁllment of crypto-anarchist ideals of total decentralization andautomation of agreements, yet fail to provide an easy path for normal people to reach those ideals.

5Holo is a pragmatic compromise — a bridge for people to transition toward greater and greater
decentralization and autonomy. But since Holo must interface with the centralized systems of today,
some parts of it are also centralized. So this is not a typical crypto project or paper. We've alreadybuilt a fully distributed platform in Holochain. Now we want to take it to the mainstream. Holo is thebridge to get there.

Introduction
This paper sets out multiple interdependent innovations that work together to enable a large shift in
the landscape of crypto applications and currencies. After a brief overview to provide context forthese innovations, we explain each:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.

Technological Innovations: Scalable P2P applications on Holochain,
Technological Innovations: Hosting P2P apps for mainstream users,
Currency Innovation: Double-Entry Crypto-Accounting system for rewarding Hosts,
Business Model Innovation: Leveraging excess capacity using Sharing Economy principles,
Funding Innovation: Bonding ICO with Crowdfunding to demonstrate real demand andestablish stakeholders in an ecosystem backed with real world assets.

These innovations weave together to form a coherent approach. In order to have a self-regulating
ecosystem hosting distributed applications, we need an accounting method that improves eﬃciency
as it scales so we can reward hosts in the sharing economy of the ecosystem which is created byinviting all stakeholders to participate in the system through our ICO (Initial Community Oﬀering)which provides the right to purchase hosting services.

Overview of Holo Ecosystem
The Holo ecosystem relies on hosts that provide processing and storage for distributed applications
while earning redeemable credits.

6

HostsHolo takes hosting of sophisticated social applications out of centralized data centers to the edges of
the Internet where our devices live. It makes self-scaling infrastructure a reality through peer-to-peer
architecture, which automatically performs load-balancing and load-sharing across thousands oreven millions of peers.
Holo enables hosts to turn a consumer-grade mini-computer into a source of revenue, where they
get paid for hosting distributed applications. Hosts choose what apps to serve, and set their own
hosting prices and priorities.
Holo is where the crowd becomes the cloud.

Distributed Apps
Some of the most popular apps today are made in a way that already needs Holo. Using Holo would
mean that Wikipedia wouldn't have to keep doing fundraising, or social apps like Twitter wouldn't
have to struggle for a revenue model while pushing advertising to fund massive infrastructure.
Imagine if the more popular an app became, the more hosting power it received from new users
installing the app and sharing the load.
What if developers could build distributed applications in familiar languages like JavaScript? What if
they could use Rapid Application Development tools to orient themselves to the process, with readytools for testing apps for scalability and vulnerabilities? These are some of the ways we're making theroad to a distributed internet easy, while incentivizing thousands of hosts to support the process.

Credits
Hosts are paid in Holo's crypto-credits, called HoloFuel, which are eﬃciently designed to transact ahigh volume of micro-transactions. The value of hosting credits stays stabilized because they're
backed by a valuable modern asset: computing power. As more hosts come online and sharecomputing power, the network becomes more valuable, giving the credits more purchasing power in
relation to the service they are designed to support.
HoloFuel functions by enabling the long-proven standardized practice of double-entry accounting
with layers of cryptographic assurance on top of it. Both parties in a transaction sign the transaction toeach other’s account chains, and these transactions are validated by peers on a shared DHT(distributed hash table).
Holo provides a crypto-accounting infrastructure audited and notarized by the network.

Payment Flow
A common payment ﬂow might be as follows: (See diagram below.)

7

1.

2.
3.
4.
5.

6.

Publisher purchases hosting (by buying credits from Holo). Their means of payment (dollars,
euro, Ether, Bitcoin, etc.) remains held in a Reserve Account, which enables that account totransfer the credits to the Publisher’s account.
Host generates signed service logs as they ﬁeld requests and provide responses to people
accessing the app through their web browsers.
Host submits a Proof-of-Service invoice to the Publisher when they accumulate a chunk ofhosting in their log.
Publisher pays the Host in hosting credits after validating the Proof-of-Service.
Host might opt to cash out their hosting credits from the Reserve Account where theoriginal payment was made. Cashing out will be in cryptocurrency initially: As we grow we will
work with appropriate regulators to determine the best way to include national currency cashout.
A Host can only cash out credits earned for hosting.

In the future the micro-transaction ﬂows for hosting payments could also undergird a general
purpose cryptocurrency payment system in a similar way that “gas” powers the Ethereum transactionengine. The Holo organization will take a tiny portion of each transaction, detailed in the revenue
model section on page 21.

8

1. Tech Innovations: Scalable Applications
Scalable dApps
Holochain provides the underlying cryptographic fabric with data sharing and validation protocols
that enable massive peer-to-peer applications. The agent-centric approach to computation1 removes
the need for consensus, eliminating synchronization bottlenecks.
Rather than thinking of Holochain like blockchain, it may be better to think of it like git repositories foreach agent which can be published, shared, synchronized or merged via a BitTorrent-like DHT(Distributed Hash Table). The provenance of all shared data is strictly enforced and the structure,content, and its compliance with shared application rules are validated by randomized peers. 2

Comparing Blockchain and Holochain
The following chart oﬀers a comparison between several aspects of blockchain and Holochain interms of approach, energy usage, volume, scalability, platform and eﬃciency. This summary can help
a developer or community determine whether Holochain or blockchain is the right platform for theirapplication. The eﬃciency and scalability of Holochain drives the beneﬁts of energy use andtransaction volume.
blockchain

Holochain

Hash-chain
approach

Data-centric, a single global data set - one
shared reality across all nodes.

Agent-centric, allows nodes to act
independently, or in tight coordination onlywith counterparties, and then shareindependently evolving data realities thatcome to agreement over time.

Energy Use

Bitcoin consumes more than 0.1% of theworld’s electricity3 4 to power less than
0.0001% of the world’s money.

Since no mining is required, no specialized
processors5 are needed, making it feasible
to run full nodes on low-power computersor cell phones.

Transaction
VolumeNeo currently processes +1000
transactions per second. Bitcoin andEthereum considerably less at a handful
per second.

Expected to surpass ﬁnancial exchange
backbones like the Visa network which has a
max of 56,000 transactions per second.

Scalability

Even ignoring proof-of-work, there areserious scalability limits on synchronizing a
global ledger across many nodes. 6

With a sharded DHT, the transaction load
per node gets lighter as the network grows 7.

Brock, Arthur: The Two Main Fallacies of Distributed Computing and Blockchain
Holochain White Paper or github repo3
https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption Energy usage statistics: .1% for Bitcoin plus .02% for Ethereum4https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption
5
Examples: https://asicminermarket.com or https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_rig
6
http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~prateeks/papers/Bitcoin-scaling.pdf
7
Transaction validation and storage is divided across more nodes, and the lookup across nodes only grows logarithmically. See
Holochain White Paper
12

9Platform

Can now only run eﬀectively with special
mining rigs or wasteful staking algorithms.

Can run on a Raspberry Pi or a mobile
phone.

Computationaleﬃciency ofarchitecture(not 1 machine)O(n*m) for validating transactions on
blockchain as a whole distributed
architecture.

O(n/m*log m) for validating transactions.

Consensus
EﬀectsCore consensus algorithms centralize
power (make the rich richer). Proof-of-Work
results in inﬁnitely growing computational
overhead for ﬁnite data set.

No mining or staking. No consensus. Not
vulnerable to majority attacks. You only haveto trust the code on your own node and canvalidate counterparty’s history directly.

Please consult the Holochain white paper8 for a more thorough understanding of its architecture. At
the time of publication, Holochain is already in Alpha release with a number of important early
applications (such as a distributed Twitter-clone, and distributed public key infrastructure), whichhave been designed to demonstrate its scalability and usability.
While Holochain is a critical innovation, we created the bridge back to the world of the web throughHolo (a technology built on top of Holochain) to reach mass market.

2. Tech Innovations: Hosting P2P Apps for Mainstream
Users
Holo extends P2P applications to the web by bridging into existing Internet architectures. Speciﬁcallythis means generating web gateways, providing DNS resolution across thousands of peers, andvirtualizing Holochain’s cryptographic fabric to operate partially on host machines and partially on
end-user’s web browsers.
Distributed application hosting is no simple task, and it only becomes possible by the unique way that
Holo weaves all of these innovations together along with the cryptocurrency incentives to drive
hosting.
Holo will be able to perform competitively with hosting of web applications outside of the crypto
space. The following chart compares Ethereum, Holo, and Amazon Web Services as an example ofcentralized cloud hosting.

8

http://holochain.org/white-paper

10EthereumHolo

Amazon Web Services

Global Ledger Blockchain

Peered chains with entries
shared to DHT

CentralizedEﬃciency

Extremely Low

High

High

SystemicComplexity

Poor: O(n*m) plus
Proof-of-Work

Good: O(n log m)

Good: O(n)Price ofComputation

Extremely highMid-range – set by hosts

Low

High – Public

Mid – Custom membership

Low – Private

Immutable Contract

Can link to Replacement CodeDynamic CodeHigh between EthereumContracts.

High between Holochain Apps

Low

Architecture

Exposure
Evolvability
Interoperability

For hosting, AWS has many strengths, speciﬁcally eﬃciency, price, and risk reduction. Holo, while
competitive, diﬀerentiates itself primarily through distributing hosting services throughout the
network. This approach avoids the increasing concerns with issues of centralization:● Network agents’ interactions are mediated by third parties.
● Centralized data storage and proprietary permissions make user data an easy target forgovernment audits; security breaches; surveillance by privileged actors; and undisclosed
sales, distribution, and manipulation.
● Ownership of user and network data is held by web platforms.
● Unreliable for zero-latency requirements where local synchronizing data is needed, e.g. IOT,
self-driving cars.
With Holo, those challenges are addressed by distribution, rather than centralization, of storage andprocessing across the network. However current approaches to distributed services bring their own
challenges:● Consistency, Availability, and Partitioning● Approaches using uniﬁed data sets creates two major ineﬃciencies:○ High computational overhead for data-centric consensus.
○ Creates the additional challenge of having to manufacture universal time sequence
across disparate clocks and network delays.
Holochain addresses these challenges by providing an agent-centric, relativistic frame to establish
underlying data integrity such that applications can resolve the occasional collision of rival data setsby means appropriate to the social context of that app.

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3. Currency Innovation: Double-Entry
Crypto-Accounting
Designing a currency to support the Holo ecosystem required us to meet several challenging criteria.
These criteria demanded an eﬃciency far beyond current cryptocurrency and at a micro-scale thattraditional transaction fees prohibit. These were the design constraints for Holo’s currency system9:●●●

Must cost less in computing cycles and in fees than the original computing and funds being
counted.
Must support millions of transactions per second and account for service provision in batches,surpassing ﬁnancial exchange backbones like the Visa network, which has a maximum
estimated capacity of 56,000 transactions per second.
Must optimize market value of its units in relation to cost of hosting, for a steady and stabletrajectory, preferably growing in value over time.

We solved these issues through crypto-accounting where credits are backed by a real-world asset:
hosting as well as through selective automation, our approach to smart contracts (described further
on page 18). The solution requires abandoning tokens altogether10 and focusing on accounting. While
double-entry accounting is ancient, bringing it forward into cryptocurrency is an innovation thatsolves the design constraints needed for Holo to responsibly handle a massive transaction volume atscale.

Cryptocurrency: Comparing Crypto-coins to
Crypto-accounting Credits
The following chart demonstrates the signiﬁcant diﬀerences between Crypto-coins and Holo’s
crypto-credits (HoloFuel), which is then further explained below.

IssuancemethodShared “Ledger”
Value
Ontology

Crypto-coins

Holo’s Fuel

Fiat (by randomized authority from
Proof-of-Work or Proof-of-Stake)

Mutual credit. Never created fromnothing — always an oﬀsetting debit for
any credit

A Single Global Blockchain

Sharded Validating DHT

Fluctuating (not asset-backed)

Stable (asset-backed)

Data-Centric: requires consensus
typically achieved by Ineﬃcient
proof-of-work or proof-of-stake

Agent-Centric: No consensus required.
Mutual counter-audit + randomized
validation to build CALM11 shared DHT

Additional information on the design constraints is provided in the Appendix.
http://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Arthur_Brock_Against_the_Consensus_on_Data_Consensus_in_the_Blockchain
11
Consistency As Logical Monotonicity
9

10

12

ChainAccounting

Global competitive

Local collaborative

Single authorization spend

Mutual authorization double-entry

Crypto-Accounting rather than Cryptocurrency
HoloFuel is not a crypto-token or cryptocoin, but a mutual credit accounting system where everytransaction is countersigned on the local chains of both counterparties. This allows us to design thecrypto-credits to forge new patterns of social and market behaviors that have not previously beenutilized for cryptocurrencies.
In particular, we are optimizing HoloFuel to function as a medium of exchange currency, rather than astore of value currency. To build a thriving crypto-economy, credits need to circulate rather than beretained as a speculative investment.12
There are several important characteristics of HoloFuel:● It is asset-backed.
● It does not use tokens or coins.
● Transactions are counter-signed by both parties.
This enables a currency supply that breathes, so it can be value-stable without being value-static.

Asset Backed
Tokens are issued by ﬁat: they come from nothing, and can really only be spent. A currency is backed
by something when it can be redeemed for that thing.
Technically "redemption" is diﬀerent than "spending." If you have a local currency backed by dollars,
when you redeem it for dollars, the currency you redeem has left circulation, and the reserve ofdollars has been diminished, and the reserve must be expanded again to issue more of the local
currency.
Shortly after the system starts, Holo accounts will show negative balances in the Infrastructure
Account and the HOT Reserve Account as payments are made and as HOT is swapped at theReserve. Reserve Accounts (all managed by Holo) are always zero or negative because theseaccounts are debited for the credits people purchase (with outside funds now held on reserve).
There are two ways Holo gets paid for hosting:

121.

For hosting provided directly from Holo's servers (minimal), Holo is paid credits. These comefrom someone's positive balance reducing Holo's negative balance, hence taking thosecredits out of circulation in exchange for hosting.

2.

For hosting provided indirectly by the network of hosts, it is paid in outside currencies(reserved for hosts). When a host redeems their Proof-of-Service credits, they spend fromhttps://medium.com/holochain/building-responsible-cryptocurrencies-d45d7d2173ed

13

positive balance, reducing a Reserve Account's negative balance, taking those credits out ofcirculation.
Since the credit limits on the system are directly connected to providing hosting power (whether
extended to hosts or Holo), and then redeemed against those negative balances, the system isbacked by that asset.

No tokens. No coins.
Instead of being token-centric, which requires computational overhead invested in establishingconsensus, Holo is agent-centric. In an economic context, this upgrade leverages traditional
double-entry accounting by using cryptographic signatures committed to immutable chains as
accounts. In this method, instead of managing a global ledger of coins, each agent (or user, or
account) manages its own local chain of transactions. This means that each person’s balance is
encoded on their own chain, so when two people transact, they only need to audit their counterpart’s
history to be sure they have the credits they’re spending. One party’s balance goes up, and the otherparty’s balance goes down, in equal measure. Every credit has an oﬀsetting debit. They need neither
permission nor consensus from anyone who is not party to the transaction.

Countersigned Transactions
The counterpart’s signature locks the record from being edited afterwards, which also eﬀectively
makes all prior content in the chain immutable. This immutable history enables anyone to quickly
calculate someone’s balance and audit their history by replaying their transactions to conﬁrm
signatures and changes in balance.
As an example, Alice agrees to sell hosting to Bob for some HoloFuel. They communicate with eachother via node-to-node messaging to build a transaction for a two-phase commit process. Each entry
in someone's local chain is connected by signed headers.
One party initiates the transaction, leaving blank the ﬁelds the counterparty must complete. Eachagent exchanges the data required to validate the other’s state. This involves each retrieving andauditing the other’s chain to conﬁrm that they are in a valid state to complete the transaction (forexample, the buyer has the credits they’re spending). The person receiving funds indicates theirapproval by building a pre-ﬂight header for their chain and sending it to the buyer. When the sender
responds with their header, they both commit it to their own source chains with the record of thecounterpart’s signature in the header they provided.
Note that BOTH parties actively participate in the transaction and must sign it to their chains. This is
not the spending of a coin by a single keyholder, but a mutually agreed-upon transaction with theopportunity to validate the other party’s state before transacting with them. All nodes have the same
validation rules, so if Alice can’t validate that Bob can spend the credits he’s wanting to spend, thenher app will reject the transaction. It doesn’t matter if others before her colluded with Bob. Every
non-colluding actor will reject illegal operations. Bad actors, in this sense, can have no eﬀect onlegitimate users nor on the currency or its supply.

14

Breathing Currency Supply
Since all valid transactions are double-entry accounting entries, Holo’s internal crypto-accounting
functions just like a balance sheet13 where every transaction keeps the sheet in balance. Every credit
has an oﬀsetting debit. Nobody ever gets to create something from nothing. There is no minting,mining, or burning of coins. This means the sum of all the positive balances is always equal to thesum of all the negative balances.
When no coins exist, and a matching debit for every credit is always required, managing the currency
supply is fundamentally diﬀerent. The simple reason for this is that the net currency supply is always
ZERO.
There are two primary ways the currency supply breathes:
1. Through the many small credit limits (explained further, later in the document) of accounts
providing the assets (hosting power, app development, app provision) which back the value ofthe credits, and
2. Through a few larger credit limits of Reserve Accounts and the Infrastructure Provider.
Think of operating a value-stable cryptocurrency a bit like building and maintaining a bridge.
● The Reserve Accounts are the stanchions initially suspending the weight of perceived value.
● The Infrastructure Provider are the engineers and construction crew, they need capital for thematerials and ongoing revenue for the maintenance.
● The key players in the app ecosystem (hosts, publishers, and developers) are the road with
their credit limits being the expansion joints in the sections of concrete.
You don’t achieve stability without all these parts working together — and without ﬂexibility designed
into the right places, the whole thing is too brittle and it collapses. To achieve value stability of acurrency you must establish feedback loops which keep supply and demand in dynamic balance.

Value Stable — Not Value Static
The most critical component in the value stability of HoloFuel is the fact that it is backed by a vitalmodern asset: computing power. Estimated 2017 revenue for cloud hosting is $264 billion dollars14
Holo’s credits are not cryptographic tokens divorced from any speciﬁc value, they are integral to theoperation of a large-scale computing infrastructure.
HoloFuel is priced in computing units: processing time, bandwidth, and storage. It is available forpurchase from Holo as well as the whole community of hosts. It is also redeemable across that wholecommunity for computing power. Even though credits can also be used for general ﬁnancialtransactions, as the number of hosts grows, that mass of their computing power stabilizes valuation.
Hosts set their own prices for their computing power which will tend toward stability when averaged
across a large ecosystem of servers distributed across the planet.
Another feedback loop stabilizing the price is the fact that Holo hosting is feasible on commodity
hardware.15 If the price of HoloFuel rises signiﬁcantly, people are incentivized to connect more
http://www.accountingexplanation.com/double_entry_system.htm
Gartner projection
15
We’ve tested running over 50 simultaneous instances of applications on a $35 Raspberry Pi

13

14

15

computing power to the network. And since trades on exchanges are not likely to deviate wildly fromthe prices for which people can buy computing power, this incentivization structure places adecentralized throttle on massive price pumps. This grounding in the delivery of a real world asset
with practical value provides a substantial center of gravity for the price of HoloFuel.
Value-stable does not mean static — there is no external value reference to ﬁx a price to. Externalcurrencies ﬂuctuate in value too much for credits to be pegged to any one thing. Also, the value ofcredits is still dependent on real world factors like the cost of electricity, computing hardware, andInternet connectivity. Variations of account balances moving closer and further from their credit limits
enable small changes in the supply to strengthen immunity to wild ﬂuctuations and pump-and-dump
manipulations.16

Participating with HoloFuel
Hosting System — Roles and Responsibilities
HoloFuel is designed to power distributed applications operated by a network of hosts who provide
computing power. Therefore, speciﬁc roles and responsibilities are deﬁned within this system. Most ofthese roles can be stacked such that an agent (a node with private/public keys and the ability tointeract with Holo and its hosted applications) may hold multiple roles. The exceptions to this rule are
Reserve Accounts and the Holo organization, which acts as an Infrastructure Provider.

End-User Participant
An end-user accesses crowd-hosted applications via standard web browsers, so their deﬁning
characteristic is that they have not installed Holochain. Holo is designed to help such end-users reach
their applications, keep their data out of centralized services, and make it safe and easy to do
crypto-transactions. Like all user roles, major rights and responsibilities involve following the rules
encoded in the Holo app DNA, which may include payment of transaction fees when they
accumulate to the payment threshold. End-users are constrained in using credits in several ways:● End-users cannot have a negative balance.
● End-users can participate without credits if hosts or publishers do not require credits or theend-user provides enough hosting for their own.
● Should the application require credits from an end-user they would acquire credits throughthe Reserve Account, or other non-aﬃliated sources. End-users can only spend credits which
are part of their positive balance.
● End-users spend credits as described previously.

Host
Hosts can set their own priorities and ﬁlters by app categories, price brackets, and usage demands. If
a Host doesn’t have much time or interest in such choices, they can enable an app selection autopilot.
Autopilot is a good way for Hosts to increase their revenue by bringing capacities online as needed.
Hosts who don’t want to pay much attention to pricing can also conﬁgure an auto-pricing app. They
16

Described by the SEC here.

16

can set basic priorities such as trying to serve the greatest demand, seeking the highest payers, oradjusting toward a middle-of-market zone to get hosting volume that is optimal instead ofoverwhelming. Hosts can also set their own prices. Eventually, some Hosts may opt to host certain
applications for free — if, for example, a Host is passionate about a public-interest project, like a P2P
Wikipedia, SETI, or Genome Mapping project. Some people may choose higher thresholds thanothers, depending on their sensibilities for proﬁt, risk, philanthropy, etc.
Hosts will receive a credit limit proportional to their hosting revenue some time after the HOT swap
period and once they have at least 3 months of hosting history. The credit algorithm is a system-wide
formula designed to deter abuse which will make a portion of the last quarter earnings available for a
Host to borrow against. The system overall includes anti-gaming mechanisms to deter faking
transactions intended to inﬂate one’s credit limit. The credit limit is expanded based on the notion thatearned hosting revenue indicates future capacity to repay the negative balance.
● Hosts acquire credits as payment from Publishers for their processing and storage services,by buying them from the Reserve Account, or by providing non-aﬃliated services.
● Hosts are the only actors on the network able to redeem credits through the Reserve
Account. Their ability to redeem is speciﬁc to credits earned through payments for processing
and storage services for the Holo network, and is not available for credits acquired throughother means.

Publisher
Publishers are responsible for the maintenance and security of apps they publish on Holo. They also
agree to timely payment of Proof-of-Service invoices. Since unpaid invoices are visible to all, it is easy
enough for a Host to demonstrate a failure to pay. No central authority needs to intervene, and nosmart-contract needs to enforce payment.
If an App Developer sets up subscription, product, or service payments to be received in Holo, they
will have access to a variant of the credit algorithm used by Hosts. Many apps may take payments intraditional currencies, and would not qualify for credit from such activity, but they can use that cash topurchase hosting credits from Holo Reserve Accounts, which would then be held on reserve forredemption by Hosts. Publishers are constrained in using credits as follows:● They acquire credits by purchasing them from Holo Reserve Accounts.
● The Publisher cannot redeem credits, only spend them for services on the network.

Application Developer
Developers can complete development bounties that may be oﬀered in fuel credits. This would likely
be only a small portion of the ecosystem.
● Application Developers also acquire credits by purchasing them from Holo Reserve Accounts.
● Credits received for application development cannot be redeemed, only spent for services on
the network.

Infrastructure Provider

17

The Holo organization itself runs the Holo Application Delivery Network to enable web users tobridging to applications running on Holochain. The Infrastructure Provider is a special class of userthat has an initial credit limit equal to pre-sale hosting purchases. This role also facilitates theasset-backed, mutual-credit currency and has the authority to establish and manage value ﬂows
between Reserve Accounts and other users on the platform via the apps and software.
● The Infrastructure Provider earns credits through fees of no more than 1% taken from all
HoloFuel transactions.
● Transaction fees should cover most of the costs of operation and maintenance in thelong-term, so this line of credit is to capitalize system improvements.

Reserve Accounts
Reserve Accounts are a special type of HoloFuel account run by the Infrastructure provider which isbound to an outside currency where funds are held on reserve in a bank account or crypto wallet.
Holo holds these credits for hosts who have provided hosting services have the liquidity to exit
HoloFuel to pay for their related expenses (e.g. hardware, bandwidth, electricity, etc.). Initially, andprobably during the whole 1:1 swap window, the only Reserve Account we will operate will be boundto HOT (Holo Token).
Credit limits of Reserve Accounts expand correlated to proof of funds deposited in the outsidecurrency, so that the Reserve Account can send the HoloFuel hosting credits to the account of theperson who sent the outside funds. The credit limit contracts again correlated to the funds that hosts
redeem from the outside currency. This means the account’s credit limit (and negative balance) arealways connected to the funds in the outside account. To perform its role adequately the Reserve
Account must be transparent and demonstrate proof of funds and ongoing receipt and disbursal offunds.
After the swap window, prices of HoloFuel in each outside reserve currency are calculated from avaluation algorithm based on data collected from hosts about their reserve currency preferences andthe actual patterns of hosts using the reserve accounts. The algorithm will also adjust prices forexternal market volatility to ensure diﬀerent reserves are priced proportional to their relative value
and the demand by hosts to access that reserve currency.
Holo may also cap Reserve Accounts based on capacity growth and demand ( capacity of storage
and processing, numbers of host machines, number of applications, app users,etc.). Signiﬁcant
expansions of supply should be correlated to growth and capacity of the network.

General Purpose Transfers and Transactions
Holo needs to be able to support general purpose transfers and transactions that are not just hostingtransactions. Here are some basic examples of why:●

A Publisher has a few apps hosted on Holo. To maintain clear accounting records they
maintain separate accounts for each app. App X is their main breadwinner which brings in lotsof subscription revenue in HoloFuel. They make periodic transfers from App X to theaccounts of App Y and App Z to cover the hosting fees.

18

●
●
●

A host has multiple devices with each one earning credits in that device’s account. They
would like to pool their credits into one account to make a large purchase.
A Publisher needs to pay an App Developer for services.
An App Developer needs to pay a subcontractor for development services.

The hosting transaction structure is already ﬂexible enough to support general purpose transactions,and they are clearly needed for smooth operation of actors in the Holo hosting ecosystem, so there
is no reason to artiﬁcially constrain people from making whatever payment transactions they need.

Selective Automation: Holo GovernanceHolo provides the informational feedback loops needed for good decision-making rather thanreplacing people’s freedom to choose. Automating things in a Holo application is easy, and blending
automation with better information for making decisions is more resilient. Holo provides information
to facilitate the following in its internal hosting market:●●●

Hosts can be selected by Publishers based on quality information in their performancerecords.17
Hosts can accept or reject Publishers based on reputation for payment.
Publishers receive good information about the service provided by Hosts.

The most fundamental “terms and conditions” of the system are the code written into the Holo app
DNA. However, Holo is also a hosted commons with expected standards of behavior. The fullcomplement of social agreements simply cannot be encoded into smart contracts. Instead, it canfacilitate better collective intelligence and healthy feedback loops that enhance people’s ability tochoose who they trust, while detecting unexpected or unpredictable cheating and fraud.
All types of users are incentivized not to defraud others on the system with the understanding thatwhen they are caught all privileges on Holo may be revoked. Keep in mind that EVERY
communication and data element is signed by its author to their immutable chain, or it cannot
propagate. If someone acted badly, their actions would be published on a non-repudiable record of
their actions, meaning that their digital ﬁngerprints are all over the scene of the crime and their chain
would be rejected in the next transaction.
This enables the Holo ecosystem to have a high-functioning “immune system,” because any nodecan create a “warrant” which ﬂags fraudulent behaviors and provides the original signed records ofthe fraudster as proof. As new types of fraud are identiﬁed and able to be detected, it is easy todetermine who has already done those things, then spread warrants as proof of fraud, so other nodes
can opt to blacklist them.

17

Peers on the DHT keep statistics about their neighbors so they know how to manage the neighborhood. The
activity from the gossip protocols and network allow for reporting on percent uptime, latency, andbandwidth/sync speeds. Holoquery also reports sustained failures of a host to service Holo requests so they canbe lowered in the DNS rotation. The Infrastructure Provider and eventually Publishers will do statistical analysis
on service logs If a node is generating fraudulent billing or artiﬁcially inﬂating their charges, the host node will be
ﬂagged as a trust incident, and the Publisher will likely block that host (for that app only). Being blocked/ﬂagged
on apps could be an indicator a node may not be able to be trusted.

19

Another agreement for all Holo users is to not generate wasteful, automated, or artiﬁcial traﬃc (toboost one’s own or a conspirator’s hosting fees). If a developer needs to test app scalability they must
do that on Holochain or on a distinct Holo testing network where test nodes agree to provide for eachother computing space purely for the purposes of testing their apps for vulnerabilities and scalability.
Hosts may also make a portion of their device available for running vulnerability analysis and toprovide test infrastructure for app developers. These services may be provided free of charge or may
become a secondary product on the Holo network.
For a complex ecosystem of relationships, it is far superior to have safe settings for default behaviors,
and then enable people to choose to replace those settings with their own thresholds or make theirown special exceptions. Because of the scale of the system (both micro-transactions and large
volume), automating certain functions is crucial. Thus there is a small set of roles and processes forinteractions. The Currency White Paper provides elaborations of the types and operations ofautomatable processes: pre-authorization credits, Proof-of-Service invoices, and transaction fees (aspecial instance of the structure used for pre-authorization).

Selective Governance

Smart Contracts

Evolvable

Yes (includes means for versioning)

No — ﬁxed

Encoding

Hard-coding + feedback loops
enabling better decisions

Hard-coded

Ownership

Participants

Creator

ScalabilityHigh

Low (all nodes perform computation)

4. Business Model Innovation: Leveraging Excess
Capacity Using Sharing Economy Principles
In much the same way that Airbnb leap-frogged hotel chains with minimal capital requirements byleveraging spare space in people’s homes, Holo can compete with existing cloud hosting companies
without signiﬁcant physical infrastructure or capital investment. In the crypto space, when it comes toactually scaling distributed applications or reaching mainstream users with them, there is almost nocompetition yet.

The Larger Value Proposition
Holochain is a generalized crypto application engine. This means we can fulﬁll on the promises ofmany other major crypto projects. Between built-in functionality, applications already built, andapplications that are in progress for near-term completion, we solve many of the most pressing
problems in the crypto space including decentralized storage, scalable decentralized applications,and secure decentralized identity.

20

We believe that to eﬃciently deliver on these promises, at scale, a radical rethink is required. Our
solution to this is Holochain and Holo powered by the ﬁve innovations in this paper. Over $5 billion has
gone toward other projects to provide largely a subset of the functionality we have already built or
we expect to bring online in the near future..
Project
EOS

RaisedGeneral Capabilities$4,467M Scalable decentralized applications

Available from Holo18
Already in Alpha 0

SONM$42M Fog computing

Already in Alpha 0

Tierion$25M Veriﬁcation/Digital Notary

Already in Alpha 0

Ethereum$18M dApps & Smart Contracts on
Decentralized Computing Architecture

Already in Alpha 0(currency forthcoming)

Civic$33M Secure Decentralized identity

Already in DPKI App

Tezos$212M Integrated evolution of code/protocols

Alpha 1 in Nov 2017

Filecoin$257M Decentralized Storage

App in Dec 2017

Storj

$29M Sharded P2P Cloud Storage

App in Dec 2017

Pillar$21M Personal Data Locker

App in Dec 2017

Status$90M Mobile light client

App in Jan 2018

Bancor$153M Liquidity for cryptocurrencies

In HoloFuel
March 2018

$5,347M
By keeping the focus on the security and scaling of a cryptographic application engine, Holochain canfoster a massive ecosystem of distributed application projects much larger than anything seen in thisspace so far. When you add to that the ability of Holo to make these applications available tomainstream users in their web browser, that creates an even greater multiplier on the reach and value
for the whole ecosystem.

The Revenue Model for HoloTo have a thriving crypto-economy on Holo, the credits need to be actively circulating, not parked
with everyone hoping for future market cap increase. Therefore, the revenue is tied to transaction
fees, rather than outside trading value of a token. This incentivizes us to attract lots of applications,many hosts, and to maintain a value stable currency to encourage the use of HoloFuel above andbeyond hosting.
Here are a few basic scenarios showing how this may play out:

Note: We are not claiming identical functionality, features, or user experience has been built, but rather that the coreunderlying problem related to the decentralized application integrity has been addressed and basic features have been
implemented. Also note the total of initial funds raised is just over $1 billion, but EOS keeps raising funds, so we decided tobring the ﬁgures up to date with that fact.
18

21

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

Something better beats us to market and none of this gets traction. While possible, thisseems unlikely since we’re already to Alpha on Holochain. In some domains, there are claims
that certain functionality is impossible, yet we already have it working.
We make it ﬁrst to market, but have some critical bug/failure that negatively impacts the
Holochain brand and so we lose critical time and credibility while ﬁxing the bugs. We believe,
just like with DAO and Ethereum, as long as we are transparent and diligent in working
towards a world where Holochain and Holo exist we can overcome critical bugs/failures.
We fail to deliver on the promises of the crowdfund or ICO due to delays in HoloPorts, notenough hackathon demand, or not enough demand for Holo and so Holochain apps don’treach the mainstream.
Holo makes it to market, but users are actually afraid to jump from centralized to fast andscalable dApps. This also seems unlikely as blockchain has primed the market for thesesolutions, but has not been able to scale. In this scenario, Holo starves from inadequatetransaction revenue and needs to restructure to generate other revenue sources.
Holo grows a thriving dApp ecosystem. In this scenario we look toward the revenues andproﬁtability of cloud hosting — rapid growth, a market in the hundreds of billions. Given how
easy it is to build crypto apps in our framework to solve signiﬁcant challenges (seecomparison chart of over $5B put into solving problems we already solve), this seems to be a
viable path. Participants in our ecosystem are well rewarded for their work: Holo transaction
revenue on a small corner of this market will be more than adequate for infrastructure
maintenance, innovation, and growth, plus small trading volume on HoloFuel as a generaluse currency when it becomes open for this use.
Holo explodes into a massive crypto ecosystem for dApps and asset-backed currencies.
Not app hosting or general trading, but more asset-backed currencies on the Holo model
start operating on Holochain and running app extensions on Holo to reach mainstream users.
Holo is widely used as a general purpose trading currency (akin to current Ethereum levels at$300M/day). In this scenario our challenge will be what to do with too much transaction
revenue, and how to best invest it for the health of the ecosystem. We will certainly use
crowd direction of funds and may cap transaction fees.

We are Growing an Ecosystem
Within Holo we are creating shared incentives for eﬃciency instead of ineﬃciency. HoloFuel grows invalue the more eﬃcient the network gets. We are developing Holochain, building Holo, building an
app development community and building a host network at the same time so we can build a thriving
ecosystem.
Why would application developers build and run on Holo? Because Holo oﬀers:● RAD tools (Rapid Application Development) to get them started.
● Use of familiar programing languages (like JavaScript) for their apps.
● Their app leverages user assets, and they realize their users may still want to keep a copy
(like social media, Wikipedia, blogging platforms, etc.).
● Interoperability with other crypto apps in the ecosystem.
● Side channels and oﬀ-chain computing for Ethereum that is still decentralized.
● Core modules and services they don’t have to rebuild (Distributed PKI, key revocation andmanagement, sovereign identity, indexing and search, content addressability, app store for
distributing your app, backups, ﬁle sharing, etc.).

22

●Use of a hosting infrastructure which automatically scales as the user base grows, and wherea signiﬁcant portion of your users may self-host.

By combining technical, currency, and dApp development into one ecosystem we are able to createa business that:
●
●
●
●
●
●

Has a small central footprint (not many employees necessary) and lightweight infrastructure;
Creates value (reputation, money) for hosts, developers, and users rather than the network
owner;
Keeps hosting fees and transaction fees to a small portion of all HoloFuel transacted;
Allows for governance power to reside within the ecosystem, diminishing the need for out of
touch boards and management teams to exert central control;
Has agile boundaries between jobs for employees, contractors, and community;
Ensures that fees go into future features and infrastructure expansion rather than proﬁt taking.

Cloud Hosting Size and GrowthHolo brings sharing, through this innovative business model, to hosting. Initially, Holo is a hosting
business which can continue to grow its capacities with negligible capital investment (like Airbnb
became the biggest hotelier). We believe there is enormous opportunity within the cloud hosting
industry to beneﬁt from predicted industry size and growth rates.
Table 1 IaaS Public Cloud Services Market Share, 2015–2016 (Millions of U.S. Dollars)Company

2016 Revenue

2016 Market
Share2015 Revenue

2015 Market
Share2015 to 2016
GrowthAmazon

9,775

44.2%

6,698

39.8%

45.9%

Microsoft

1,579

7.1%

980

5.8%

61.1%

Alibaba

675

3.0%

298

1.8%

126.5%

Google

500

2.3%

250

1.5%

100.0%

Rackspace

484

2.2%

461

2.7%

5.0%

Others

9,147

41.2%

8,074

48.4%

13.2%

Total

22,160100%

16,861

100%

31.4%

Note: 2015–2016 revenue for Alibaba has been adjusted from estimates previously published in “Market Share: IT Services,
2016” Source: Gartner (September 2017)

The cloud computing industry has one dominant player with a large number of smaller players. It is amarket where customers are looking for solutions outside those Amazon Web Services provide, so
there are opportunities to enter with a solution that meets currently unmet needs.

23

Amazon Web Services is growing revenue and proﬁt quarter on quarter. We expect this to continue
for the next two years.

Monthly Transaction Volume (Currency)
This chart shows some samples of monthly trading volumes in cryptocurrencies in comparable
functional spaces as HoloFuel which range from $300 million/mo to over $13 billion.19

5. Funding Innovation: Bonding ICO with Crowdfunding
We are taking an innovative approach to funding Holo, running separate crowdfunding and ICO
campaigns.
19

Source: https://coinmarketcap.com/
24

Our ICO is a presale of hosting credits. The hosting will be provided by the HoloPorts sold in our
crowdfunding campaign. We need the crowd as stakeholders in the whole project and its future.
People participating in the crowdfunding primarily as hosts and developers become stakeholders
along with pre-sale credit purchasers through the ICO. This is critical to creating a thriving ecosystem.
We intend to run a sale that is as inclusive as possible, meaning future Holo hosts and users will not
be pushed out by a few rich people buying all available credits within minutes. We also intend to act
responsibly by having a meaningful cap on the amount of credits we allow ourselves to sell, insteadof just raising as much as possible.
In December 2017 and January 2018, Holo will establish its infrastructure and services through a saleof hardware hosting nodes, developer training, application development support, data hosting, anddata processing. This process will take place through a tripartite strategy aimed at reaching a broad
number of users and hosts, all the while ensuring access to the funds needed to deliver theseproducts.

Crowdfunding Campaign
Holo will oﬀer training for building Holochain applications (through hackathons) and the necessary
hardware to run the Holochain protocol through a crowdsale on the IndieGoGo platform. The
crowdsale will fund the manufacture of hardware nodes required for hosting and processing data on
the Holo network by pre-selling these devices to future hosts. Purchasers of these nodes will be able
to earn Holo network credits for performing the service of hosting sharded data from distributed apps
once the network launches. In addition to hardware nodes, the crowdfund will oﬀer in-person training
services for Holochain development, application design consultation, and tool kits for jump-starting
the app development process.

Private Sale
Hosting Credits Exclusive to Hosts and Developers — Not Transferable
Before Launch of HoloTeam members, friends, family, and Holo users who have already established themselves asapplication developers or Holo hosts will have access to a limited pre-purchase of up to $1,000 perperson of hosting credits. They will receive a non-transferable digital receipt for their purchase, which
will be credited to their account when Holo launches in 2018. These sales are limited to $1M.

ICO — Initial Community Oﬀering
Transferable ERC20 Token Sale (Outside Restricted Countries)
Shortly after the launch of the Crowdfund. Holo will oﬀer a pre-sale of its services in the form oftransferable ERC20 tokens on the Ethereum public blockchain. When the Holo network goes live,25

these tokens can be exchanged for the corresponding credit balance on the Holo network anddestroyed upon exchange. The supply of tokens is set in relation to the demand proven by people’spurchases from the crowdfund and of non-transferrable HoloFuel.
The initial token sale will open with a €2.5M supply that expands daily according to an equation thattranslates the amount of demonstrated demand from the crowdfund and private sales into a
correspondingly increased ERC20 token supply. We only want to raise the capital needed to support
the expected demand — so this is our gauge to predict how many people will need tech support,
developer tools and trainings. This increased supply of new tokens will be released each day basedon the cumulative total of the crowdfund and private sale activity. Participants in the transferable
ERC20 token sale will pay in Ether and have access to their tokens within a week of the close of the
ICO, far in advance of the launch of Holo.
The design of this strategy is meant to establish a Holo user base through multiple avenues, bring in
the money needed to build and launch Holo, and raise only the resources necessary to support
expected demand.

Design of Solidity Smart Contracts
●
●
●
●
●
●
●

We take a strategy of splitting the contracts into small-as-possible logical units and leveragecode already written and tested by others.
Contract addresses are injected after creation so that if single contracts are updated, others
can be reconﬁgured to communicate to new contracts as needed.
All our contracts are based on the zeppelin-solidity library. Where modiﬁcations wereneeded, we copy-pasted the zeppelin code and then made minor changes.
We use SafeMath for all mathematical functions.
All code is tested.
The contracts have roles that allow certain actions (i.e. updater, minter, owner) that are usually
updatable by the owner.
We attend closely to the gas usage of our code and optimize where possible.

Sale Mechanics
Sales from the crowdfunding serve as predictive indicators of the ﬁrst year demand for participation in
Holo.
●

●
●
●

Each day’s sales of HoloPorts and developer events expand the supply of tokens according
to a ﬁxed formula which means the token supply is not a predetermined number. Once perday, the newly released amount of credits will be written to the blockchain enabling further
credit/token sales. If all tokens are sold out, nobody can buy tokens until the next update
releases more (which of course can be expanded by purchasing from the crowdfunding
campaign).
We don’t allow any single wallet to buy more than 10% of the credit supply of each day.
We log the amount of available credits and sold credits for each day of the sale period andwill make these statistics visible on our credit sale webpage.
After the sale period ends, we mint tokens for the team such that the team gets 25% of thetotal number of tokens in existence. Thus, during the sale only 75% of credits, calculated
based on crowdfunding statistics, is made available for sale. The aim is to avoid artiﬁcially
increasing the supply with tokens minted for the team.

26

ERC20 Token Distribution
If we raise less than €1M we will return the ETH to all participants and will fulﬁll the project throughother funding strategies. Since 25% of the tokens are reserved for the organization, including
founders, team, and prior investors, we will mint €3.3M worth of tokens on day one, in order to make
€2.5M worth available for sale.
Role

Allocation

Organization & Team

25%

Community

75%

Daily Distribution
The fact that people will buy a token to speculate with does not mean there is a demand for the
product or service. We are leveraging our crowdfunding campaign as an indicator of demand for our
product and to gauge the size of our initial community of developers, hosts, and users. Based on thesale of HoloPorts and developer tools, new tokens are released by an algorithm connected to thatproject demand.
We chose to start with €2.5M because we see that as the base cost to build the software and initialinfrastructure. However, the greater the demand, the more funds we will need to service that demandand support the community. We are targeting our ICO raise to cover the needs of our ﬁrst year to
support the community, the application developers, the end-user volume, the infrastructure, and theliquidity reserves behind credits. The larger that demand, the more capital we need to service it until
transaction fees can cover operational costs.

The Future
Budget Allocation by amount raised
We are raising >€2.5M denominated in ETH. If we don’t hit the €2.5M target we will allocate theamount raised, according to the €2.5M allocation, as follows.

Allocation

2.5M

5M

10M

20M

Holo Development

30%

20%

20%

15%

Holochain Development

25%

15%

10%

10%

Currency Reserves

10%

30%

35%

40%

Infrastructure

10%

10%

10%

10%

Operations

10%

10%

10%

10%

27

Support of Developers, Hosts & Publishers

5%

5%

5%

5%

Marketing & Communications

5%

5%

5%

5%

Events & Programs (hackathons, training)

5%

5%

5%

5%

Holo Development Roadmap and Timelines
Holo

HolochainApps

Q4 2017

Crowdfunding campaign and ICO
to raise capital for Holo, grow Holo
network, and attract developers
for Holochain.

Alpha 0 and then Alpha 1 Release.

Design and prototype voting anddecision making apps (meta-apps
that can be included within other
Holochain apps).

Q1 2018First HoloPorts shipped to 500+
hosts.

Alpha 2 including high levelapplication development
framework and pluggable
governance.

Holochain Directory acts as an app
store / package manager for the
50 or so Holochain based
applications that have beencreated to date. Partnerships
established for other asset-backed
currencies (energy, food, housing,etc.).

Q2 2018First test transaction on Holo using
Holo fuel. Reaching 5,000 hosts.

Alpha 3 includes security audit andthe ability to adjust DHT
parameters and behavior.

Core app services available:- Holochain Directory (as pkg mgr)
- DPKI & Identity Services- Holochain Index- Smart Caching.

Q3 2018

100 test transactions an hour on
Holo using Holo fuel. Test net of
Holo running on 15,000 hostdevice.

Holochain in solid Beta Release.
Commitment to backward
compatibility and more security
audits.

Q4 2018

Test net Holo running on 30,000
host devices. Number of
Holochain nodes has surpassed
number of bitcoin nodes.
(Currently BTC 7900, ETH 26,000).
By end of the year, approachingproduction level sophistication.

Peer-to-Peer applications on
Holochain reach 50 apps and10,000 users (with apps that don't
require paid hosting to smooth out
imbalanced
production/consumption).

Replacement for gmail / gdocs /collaboration tools app available
as beta on Holochain.

By end of the year, approachingproduction level sophistication.

*For current roadmap details please see https://holo.host/roadmap

Why Holo’s Strategy Will Work28

Holo takes us beyond the limitations of blockchain
HoloFuel takes an agent-centric approach to cryptocurrency design rather than a data-centric
approach. In doing so, the Holo crypto-accounting system surpasses the eﬃciency limitations ofsimilar systems built using blockchain or other consensus-based distributed computing strategies. It
is a tokenless crypto-accounting engine. Eliminating tokens makes crypto-accounting substantiallymore eﬃcient. It frees massive amounts of computing power and network traﬃc from consensus andsynchronization of a global ledger of tokens.
We leverage principles from game theory and living systems feedback loops to establish an
equilibrium for the value stability of currency units being accounted for. This approach, using
Holochain, transforms the computational eﬃciency from blockchains O(n) to O(log n), and also
addresses common security issues for blockchain-based currencies.

Holo is a decentralised hosting ecosystem designed to work for you
Holo provides normal, everyday web users access to decentralized applications without needing toinstall additional software. This new form of hosting blends small consumer grade devices with otherhosting assets to provide an eﬃcient, dynamic, and inclusive hosting ecosystem.

Holo is an ecosystem designed by currency experts not token designers
The Holo team has vast experience over the last 15 years building alternative currencies. We havedesigned monetary currencies, reputation currencies, and cryptocurrencies, and alternate value ﬂows
to make communities work as intended. We are bringing this experience to build a Holo currency thatfacilitates an active economy, and we think crypto-accounting is the way to do this rather than crypto
tokens.

Asset-Backed Crypto Economy
If HoloFuel starts getting used as a more general purpose currency, hosting will become a smaller
portion of the economy. This enables more asset-backed currencies for electricity, food,transportation, lodging, and so on.

Holo is driven by a team determined to make decentralized, community-powered
applications work in many sectors
Holo has been developed by the team that is developing Holochain as part of its larger commitment
to realize, on a broad scale, the innovations of the Metacurrency project. The team views Holo as theﬁrst of many projects that will combine the ground-breaking Holochain technology, pre-existing
physical infrastructure (in this case broadband internet), and transformative design principles for
currency, governance, and agent-centric marketplaces. Our team believes in the power oflarge-scale, community-powered applications to change the world for the better, beginning with ouralternative to cloud computing — crowd computing. We are building both community andtechnology. Our fundraising eﬀorts along these lines aim to develop Holo, bootstrap the Holo
community, and enhance the functionality of Holochain.

Holo gives enormous upside for early adopters if we achieve our bold ambitions
The ERC20 token we are selling in the ICO is a credit for Holo. It will be convertible into HoloFuel atlaunch.

29

HoloFuel is a currency for purchasing computing (processing, bandwidth, and storage), and thus canbe thought of as denominated in compute power.
To establish the initial pricing of that compute power, i.e. the amount of computing you will get for
one Holo, we begin by establishing a benchmark of a known system, Ethereum. We will use a suite ofreal world compute tasks, both ones that others have run, and ones we run, on the Ethereum
blockchain, and use the observed cost in gas to denominate 1 compute unit. These tests will all bevisible on the Ethereum blockchain for public reference, and the code shared for anyone to run
themselves, if they wish.
The opening price of Holo when the network goes live, will be 1/10,000 that price because we knowthat running similar computations on Holochain is at least that much more eﬃcient, if not more so.
So if you send us 1 ETH, we will give the amount of credits that represents the eﬃciency multiple
between ETH and Holo credit established in our baseline tests. If our eﬃciency multiple when going
live is better than the baseline results, then the compute power you can buy with your HoloFuel will
be greater.
We currently project that the cost of computation will stabilize closer to 10 million times the eﬃciencyof Ethereum today.

Appendix and Links
Holo Currency white paper
Holochain white paper
Hosting white paper
Terms and conditions

Appendix: Criticisms and Objections“You obviously don’t understand ‘Trustless’ currencies.”
Many in the crypto project space will probably perceive transaction fees being paid to an
Infrastructure-provider as centralizing too much authority in one entity. However, paying maintenancefees to Holo, doesn’t give it a lot of extra power. It primarily enables responsible funding so we don’t
need to raise hundreds of millions of dollars to get oﬀ the ground. It also enables us to create value
stability by having an asset-backed currency.
The main power Holo has, in this context, is to update the software — the same centralized powerthat exists in most crypto projects. When a small group of people can launch a hard fork of Ethereumor Bitcoin, it is not really decentralized. 20 We already have both pluggable governance for versioningof applications and protocols, as well as individual autonomy to fork to versions of your own choosing.
Just because Holo launches an update, doesn’t mean you have to update, maybe you want toconvince some people to run Holo Classic!

20

https://medium.com/metacurrency-project/cryptocurrencies-are-dead-d4223154d783

30

In actuality, Holo is less centralized. For example, Holo doesn’t even hold a record of all transactions.
The transactions can all be found on nodes in the DHT, but they are sharded across many Hosts.
Hosts set their hosting prices, buyers and sellers on exchanges still set their prices, we have someinﬂuence in setting prices for which Reserve Accounts sell hosting. But this is signiﬁcantly lessinﬂuence than can be exerted by the 95% of Bitcoin mined by only a handful of pools, and 95% ofcoins held by a handful of groups of accounts.
For the purists who are not satisﬁed by pluggable governance and a fully P2P underlying architecturethat is much less centralized than mining class nodes, we say: “Great! Use Holochain without Holo. It
is completely P2P with zero centralization and no currency needed.” Just don’t expect it to provide
DNS services to mainstream users to reach your applications.

“But you have to use consensus!”
What we must do is provide cryptographically-ensured data integrity on a distributed platform. For
that we must also operate with Byzantine Fault Tolerance, which we do. Holochain has means foraddressing corrupted communications, corrupted storage, masquerading, lost messages,
mis-ordered messages, corrupt nodes, malicious nodes, etc.
There is a kind of implicit consensus built into Holochain which is when an entry is “put” to the DHT
has saturated its destination neighborhood. If someone tries to put the same data to the DHT later,
there will be a collision. Collisions don’t have to be a problem, sometimes it means we’re just storingcopies of the same thing, so we can just attach an additional source with signatures to the entry.
However, in the small number of cases when it is rival data, like a username or a cryptocoin, then weneed to resolve the conﬂict. If the neighborhood is already saturated, that’s easy, ﬁrst one wins, butwhat happens when people try to “put” the same thing at almost the same time producing a collision
before either could saturate? Well, one could hard-code a system of analyzing gossip of peers todetermine an absolute timeline21, but because this is a space for generalized apps, we let the app
decide.
How about an auction to the highest bidder? Or the one with higher seniority? Or a better citizenshiprating? Or you have them work it out with each other? Or whatever other approach you want to use tosolve conﬂict in the context of the community using your application.
For the small percentage of times you are dealing with collisions of rival data, why would you want toadopt the computational overhead of consensus. Well, the answer would be if you only run one very
simple app, and it is a data-centric view on tracking coins. Blockchain was designed for that one app.
Holochain is designed for all the others.

Appendix: More on Holochain
Holochain is an application development framework that provides cryptographically secured data
integrity for decentralised peer-to-peer applications without using consensus. We refer to a user of a
Holochain application as an agent.

21

http://www.swirlds.com/downloads/SWIRLDS-TR-2016-02.pdf

31

Holochain ensures data integrity for distributed applications through establishing provenance of data
published from each agent’s local, immutable chain. Public entries are then shared to a content
addressable distributed hash table (DHT), with cryptographic signatures, and enforcement of data
schemas, and application logic22 by randomly selected peers.
Therefore, Holochain establishes an agent-centric pattern for data production, sharing, andmanagement, rather than a data-centric absolutist frame23 (for which consensus is required). Once a
developer learns to do this kind of inversion in their thinking (from data-centric to agent-centric), thenbuilding a distributed application on Holochain becomes much easier and many orders of magnitude
more computationally eﬃcient than applications built for scale on blockchain.
Please consult the Holochain white paper24 for a more thorough understanding of its architecture. At
the time of publication, Holochain is already in Alpha release with a number of important early
applications (such as a distributed Twitter-clone, and distributed public key infrastructure), whichhave been designed to demonstrate its scalability and usability. The delivery roadmap and upgrades
required to deliver Holo are shown below.

Holochain delivery roadmap*
Deliverable

Description

Delivery Date

Alpha 0

Clutter: a working app to show the world

October 2017

Alpha 1

Working apps with presentable source and documentation

December 2017

Alpha 2

App dev framework upgrade and Pluggable governanceMarch 2018

Alpha 3

1st Security audit and DHT parameterization

May 2018

Beta

Commitment to backward compatibility, more security
audits, invite/engage wider app dev community

July 2018* This has evolved and Holochain RSM (refactored state model) was released in 2020,

Appendix: Holochain Upgrades
Holochain currently provides most of the underlying componentry that we need for Holo, but there
are still some modiﬁcations and improvements needed in Holochain’s core code before Holo goeslive.

Source Chain Segmentation
Separating the ability to author and sign new source chain entries to a chain from the ability torespond to other peers as a steward of someone’s source chain is critical. Hosts will never haveend-users’ private keys, so any changes will need to be signed by a user to create new entries on
their source chain. However, source chain headers and “public” entries will need to be stored with atleast some hosts in order to validate them when they are shared to the DHT.

Holochain White Paper or github repo
Brock, Arthur: The Two Main Fallacies of Distributed Computing and Blockchain24
http://holochain.org/white-paper
22

23

32

Deeper Segmentation for Source Chain Privacy
Once private keys and source chain services are performing adequately we have outlined somedeeper layers for segmenting source chains. These involve breaking entries into parts, which no
single host holds, and are only reassembled en route to authorized requests.

Reputation Upgrades
Holochain already has basic infrastructure for nodes to reject data as fraudulent, and to reportfraudulent behavior to the neighboring peers of a bad actor. Evidence is provided in the form of a“warrant” that includes the original fraudulent data signed by its author. The native immune system of
Holochain can use the accumulation of these warrants as the basis for blacklisting corrupted nodes.
Additional enhancements are planned for collecting better performance metrics of yourneighborhood peers, and enabling the possibility of deﬁning node service classes.

Pluggable Governance
Pluggable Governance modules that enable applications to manage forking of their DNA are plannedfor Holochain’s Alpha 1 release. This will be helpful for publishers when managing new releases of
their distributed software, enabling easy upgrades for their users. Within this governance process,upgraded apps can write a closing entry onto a user’s old source chain that points to their new source
chain in the updated app. The new source chain in the updated app will also have opening entries
that point back to the old source chain. This provides continuity of function and identity with clean
versioning of code and protocols.

Scalability, Security, and Optimization
Holochain will undergo increasingly stringent scalability testing, security vetting, and performance
optimizations that will continue to mature the platform and ensure its reliability for mission criticalapplications.

Appendix: Security of HoloFuel
For details of security considerations please review the Holo Cryptocurrency white paper. These
considerations are summarized below:

Anonymity
Holo is not natively optimized for anonymity. Continuity of accountability is included by design — nota bug, but a feature. As such, the currency is not optimized for illegal, black market, or underground
activities. HoloFuel is optimized to build a consistently reliable, peered network of hosting providers.
Holochain enables continuity of identity across application contexts with its DPKI app,25 which caninterface with decentralized identity service providers of your choosing.
Hosts will be required to register if they want to redeem credits for outside currencies throughreserve accounts.

25

See https://github.com/Holochain/dpki

33

Consensus Attacks
Since Holo’s currency is not based on consensus as to what coins exist, but on individual
accountability for one’s transaction history, nobody ever needs to trust a consensus lottery. You canalways audit your counterpart’s chain to validate their state and know that they have the credits
they’re spending. You need trust nobody but yourself and your installation of the software. Therefore,
attacks on consensus are not vulnerabilities for Holo. This includes Majority (or 51%) Attacks, most
Sybil Attacks, Attacker with High Computing Power, High Energy Consumption (for Proof-of-Work),
Selective Dropping of Transactions, etc.

Attacks on Absolutism
Blockchain is a strategy for managing consensus on a single authoritative reality about data, andmanufacturing a single authoritative reality about time.26 On Holo there are no coins to double-spend,and no absolute time-sequence to hack with clock drift, only the local sequence and immutablehistory of each agent’s chain. Thus, Holo is not vulnerable to attacks on a single authoritative data set
nor attacks on a universal time sequence. This eliminates vulnerabilities to Double-Spend, Clock Drift,
and most Segmentation and Scalability attacks.

The Finney Attack
An attempt to execute a fraudulent high value transaction with low conﬁrmation is a special
double-spending case called the Finney Attack. This attack merits more thorough coverage, because
there is a potential Holo variant, and we provide a detailed consideration in our white paper.

Malicious Nodes and Rival CodeIf an agent hacks their code, anomalous outputs produced that fail to validate with random DHT
peers storing those outputs will be ﬂagged as fraudulent and won’t propagate. Bad transactions can’t
spread and will result in a blacklisting of the committing agent by peers. This is similar to committing
bad blocks on a blockchain that won’t validate, except in Holochain a node only succeeds in forking
itself into their own reality where nobody else acknowledges the validity of their chain. Holo operates
in a strong Nash Equilibrium27 with all players incentivized to keep playing by the rules.
If you hack the code on your node, you could write invalid transactions to your local chain. But assoon as that data tries to propagate to the DHT in the shared public space, then the DHT peers willdetect any invalid data that breaks the shared rules coded into the DNA.
If you could get some peers to collude with you and control your hash production to manage to havedata land with selected peers (already pretty diﬃcult and likely detectable), then when you try totransact with someone later who is not a corrupted node, they would still detect your corruption inauditing your chain. There's no consensus needed because you can check for yourself.

Spamming Transactions
A node cannot generate transactions with itself, the parties in a transaction have to be distinct
identities. Two parties (or one person controlling two accounts) could rapidly transact back and forth,while paying transaction fees on each transfer. This pattern of behavior would mostly just bog down
http://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Arthur_Brock_Against_the_Consensus_on_Data_Consensus_in_the_Blockchain
John Nash “Equilibrium points in n-person games”:
http://www.pnas.org/content/36/1/48.full?ijkey=e322e2d8bd7f4202fc752d7b80b1efedaa637516&keytype2=tf_ipsecsha

26
27

34

the two transacting nodes. Others would not be prevented from performing transactions, but thiswould create a ﬂurry of gossip traﬃc in the neighborhoods of those peers. This could result in getting,at least, temporarily blacklisted if their peers detected the behavior as a Denial-of-Service attack.
An example is a user trying to inﬂate their credit limit by making it look like they have a high trading
volume, but Holochain’s anti-gaming algorithms already detect this, so it won't work.

Illegal Content
Since HoloFuel is optimized for high volumes of micro-transactions, it does not carry much payload.
So content (that it is illegal to be in possession of) cannot be stuﬀed into a transaction that you would
be forced to hold. However, applications could certainly be built to hold such content, so hosts shouldtake care in the selection of applications they choose to run.

Some of the Same Issues as Blockchain
Holo has not introduced a new breakthrough in cryptography nor ﬁgured out how to prevent network
congestion and human errors, so we are still subject to some of the same basic vulnerabilities asblockchain.

Breaking the Cryptography
SHA-256 does not seem to be in any imminent danger of being cracked28, but the crypto algorithms
are conﬁgurable and can be replaced with new ones in later versions. We have not focused on
Quantum-proof designs yet, and are happy to consider that for later releases as our community ofcryptographers and developers grows.

DDOS
Holochain has implemented some initial mechanisms to reduce gossip storms and to blacklist
Denial-of-Service attackers, but many of these optimizations will need to improve over time. A
Distributed Denial-of-Service attack is still a challenge to detect and block if there are enoughattackers. A DDOS attack would not likely bring down entire applications or the Holo network as awhole, but if it targeted individual nodes on the network it could certainly disrupt their network
services at least temporarily.

Human Error
People will still lose their keys, use weak passwords, get computer viruses, and sometimes they willabandon communities or even die, leaving inactive accounts behind. This is no diﬀerent than things
that happen with existing cryptocurrencies. Holochain’s core DPKI app (Distributed Public Key
Infrastructure) can provide assistance in managing keys, managing revocation methods, andreclaiming control of applications when keys or devices have become compromised.

Matthew Amy et al. “Estimating the cost of generic quantum pre-image attacks on SHA-2 and SHA-3”:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1603.09383

28

35

Glossary
AgentsHoloPorts
Ceptr

Commons

End-users, participants in the Holo Ecosystem.
Devices sold by Holo to enable hosts to “plug and play” the technology
and begin earning Holo-credits.
Redesigning for social organisms.
Humanity is poised on the edge of a quantum leap in evolution, not at thelevel of individuals, but at the level of our collective social organisms
like corporations, institutions and governments. In order to make thisleap, we need the same kind of architectures of intelligence thatmake it possible for trillions of cells to work together in an organism.
Large-scale collective intelligence requires communication to be
virtually instantaneous (electronic), peered, decentralized, semanticand designed to evolve in response to rapidly changing needs.
Eﬀective collaboration on such a scale would obviate most of thepower structures that underpin the social barriers to change andcould make formerly intractable problems (such as climate change,
species extinction, resource depletion, or poverty) quite readilysolvable.
Ceptr is designed to provide the building blocks of the kind of expressive
capacity which embodies nature’s architectures of intelligence andenables an explosion of new patterns of collective intelligence on
every scale.
Resources belonging to or aﬀecting the whole of a community.

Computing units

The measures of value for HoloFuel in terms of the hosting services they
provide: CPU clock cycles of processing, bandwidth of data transfer,and megabyte months of storage.

Credit limits

In a mutual credit currency, since the net supply is always zero, thenegative balances enabled by credit limits are what enables
accounts to have positive balances of credits. In HoloFuel there are
two main types of credit limits which are only available for providing
the asset-backing of the currency.
1. Large: Reserve Accounts and Infrastructure Provider have special
algorithms for backing credits with outside currencies andcapitalizing the infrastructure maintenance and growth.
2. Small: Hosting providers based on recent past months of hostingearnings.

Crypto-accounting

To secure transactions of digital assets through the keeping of ﬁnancial
records.

Decentralized
computing

Decentralized computing is the allocation of resources, both hardware
and software, to each individual space or oﬃce location. In contrast,
centralized computing exists when the majority of functions arecarried out, or obtained from a remote centralized location.

DHT

A distributed hash table (DHT) is a class of a decentralized distributed

36system that provides a lookup service similar to a hash table: (key,value) pairs are stored in a DHT, and any participating node caneﬃciently retrieve the value associated with a given key.
Double-entry
accounting

A method of managing ﬁnancial records such that every entry to an
account requires a corresponding and opposite entry to a diﬀerent
account.

DPKI

Decentralized public key infrastructure.

Holo

1)
2)

Organization acting as both infrastructure provider and primaryreserve account for the Holo Ecosystem.
The technology created to enable shared hosting on top of
Holochain, bringing it to mainstream participants.

Holochain Provides the underlying cryptographic fabric with data sharing and validation
protocols that enable massive peer-to-peer applications. The agent-centric
approach to computation29 removes the need for consensus, eliminating
synchronization bottlenecks.
Rather than thinking of Holochain like blockchain, it may be better to think of
it like git repositories for each agent which can be published, shared,
synchronized or merged via a BitTorrent-like DHT (Distributed Hash Table).
The provenance of all shared data is strictly enforced and the structure,content, and its compliance with shared application rules are validated byrandomized peers.30
HoloFuel The unit of account in Holo using value-stable double-entry accounting. The
crypto-credit used to purchase hosting in the shared Holo Ecosystem.
Holo Hosts (or Entities in the Holo ecosystem providing hosting services of P2P applications.
Hosts)
Nodes Common term for a peer or machine on a distributed system. Nodes
comprise the network, running the code, storing the data, andcommunicating with each other.
If the network in question is a distributed system, the nodes are clients,
servers or peers. A peer may sometimes serve as client, sometimes server. Ina peer-to-peer or overlay network, nodes that actively route data for the othernetworked devices as well as themselves are called supernodes.
RAD tools RAD tools (Rapid Application Development)
Rapid Application More than an SDK which gives devs access, it also includes quick scaﬀolding
Framework tools that generate the framework for your application. There is somevalidation and application logic you need to put in, but we build all the
directory structures and ﬁles for you. Most people don't know how to startbuilding a decentralised application, we give you the whole framework.
Reserve accounts Reserve Accounts are bound to outside currencies (such as dollars, euro,
Bitcoin, or Ether) with corresponding credit limits in Holo for the deposits held
in reserve. These enable people to purchase hosting in HoloFuel and enable
hosts to redeem the credits they earn for providing that hosting for the
29
30

Brock, Arthur: The Two Main Fallacies of Distributed Computing and Blockchain
Holochain White Paper or github repo37

outside currencies.
Validation Process All data published to the shared space (DHT) is validated by checking it isby Peers on DHT signed to the originating chain, and is produced according to the rules of theapplication. The validating nodes are neutral parties, selected by the
randomization of the hashing process. This ensures all peers continue
playing by the shared rules encoded in the application and that the DHT
retains data integrity since only valid data can propagate.

38