What is Holochain?

Holochain is an open-source framework for developing microservices that run peer-to-peer applications entirely on end-user devices without central servers. It provides tools to:

  • authenticate users and manage identity
  • enforce data integrity and business rules
  • manage access privileges
  • store and retrieve data
  • automatically respond to security threats
  • deploy and update application code on users’ devices
  • distribute resource load among participants

The Holochain suite consists of:

  • a service to manage running applications and provide persistence and networking
  • a software development kit (SDK) written for Rust developers
  • a set of tools for application development and testing
  • a development environment
  • a collection of core apps and libraries
  • an application manager GUI for end-users

How do I build an application?

Holochain’s tools encourage the creation of application back ends as collections of microservice-like code packages, each with its own domain of responsibility. These packages are responsible for enforcing your application’s core business logic. They define the public API with which clients interact, as well as the validation rules for data.

To build an application, you write back-end code in any language that compiles to WebAssembly bytecode. Writing WASM by hand is challenging, so we’ve written a software development kit (SDK) for the Rust programming language. We do expect, however, to support more languages in the future!

You can write a UI for your application using any language, framework, and runtime you choose, as long as it can run on your users’ devices and speak JSON-RPC over WebSocket to the user’s locally running Holochain service.

How do I deploy an application?

Instead of provisioning and deploying your application on cloud instances, you provide an installer for your users’ devices. (In the future, we’ll also have an easy-to-use app store.) Holochain’s infrastructure scales with its user base, as each user brings enough resources for themselves and contributes a little extra to support network resilience.

How is it built?

We build Holochain with the Rust programming language. This allows it to be fast and lean while encouraging a disciplined, thoughtful design that catches most bugs before they hit production.

How does it compare to…

Server-side frameworks?

Holochain is similar to frameworks like Django, ASP.NET, Laravel, Express, and Ruby on Rails—it gives you the tools to write a full-featured back end for your application.

Key differences:

  • It’s opinionated about data storage, providing its own persistence layer.
  • Data validation is a required application component; it’s implemented in callback functions that execute when data is about to be written.
  • Identity is managed via public key cryptography, similarly to SSH. Users create keys on their own machines.
  • The back end and the front end both run on the devices of its users, not a server.

Relational / SQL databases?

Each Holochain application has its own separate data store, a DHT. Records in the DHT have a defined and enforced schema, similar to a table schema.

Data in the DHT is stored differently from a SQL database, however. Key differences:

  • Data is held by the users of the app on their own devices.
  • Data propagation is eventually consistent. Not all users will see the exact same data at the same time.
  • All public data is visible to anyone with access to the application. However, users can also store some private data on their own devices.
  • Data is not stored in tables, but in individual entries that are retrieved by their unique ID.
  • Relations between entries are created with links, making the DHT more like a graph database than a relational database.
  • Currently, you can’t perform column-based or relational queries like you can with SQL, although limited querying functionality can be built with entries and links. We intend to build more indexing and querying features in the future.
  • Each user writes data to a journal on their own device before publishing it to the DHT.

NoSQL databases?

Holochain’s public graph database is similar to document stores such as MongoDB and Elastic, and key/value stores such as Redis. It most closely resembles graph databases such as Neo4j, which makes it a good match for RDF data and GraphQL- or SPARQL-based data access layers.

Key differences:

  • Data is held by the users of the app on their own devices.
  • All of an application’s public data is visible to all users of that application, although users can store private data on their own devices.
  • Field-based queries are not yet available, though they can potentially be built using existing data primitives.

Blockchain and other distributed ledger technologies (DLTs)?

Holochain could be considered a DLT, since it has some technological and conceptual similarities with blockchain, DAG chains, and other DLTs. However, it is founded on radically different assumptions.

Key differences:

  • Holochain is not a platform or network, but a development framework (similar to Tendermint).
  • All code execution, data creation, and data storage happens via an individual user running their own node, rather than a “global computer”.
  • Unlike public blockchain platforms, each application has a private network and data store.
  • Applications can also define their own governance policies, permissioning systems, and consensus/consistency algorithms.
  • Applications living in separate networks are easy to connect together through a ‘bridging’ API.
  • Rather than coordinating global agreement through mining, staking, or BFT algorithms, Holochain reinforces trustworthiness of critical data via ‘validators’ who are randomly selected for each data entry. This makes attacks on data integrity statistically difficult.
  • Each node stores its own ledger on its own device. This means that private data can be stored in the same application as public data.
  • Public data lives in the application’s DHT, a semi-structured graph database, rather than a global ledger.
  • Holochain has built-in tools to anticipate and support hard fork migrations.
  • Data storage and validation responsibility are distributed among nodes via a selection algorithm that creates overlapping ‘neighborhoods’. This reduces storage and compute requirements, making Holochain comparable in performance to sharded blockchains or DAG chains.
  • Nodes can contact each other directly without writing data to a public ledger or sending it through a gossip network.
  • Keys are unique to a node and can’t be used on another node. Key management is supported by a built-in distributed PKI dApp.
  • Holochain doesn’t natively support anonymity, but is instead optimized for identity continuity.

Serverless/lambda?

Similarly to serverless offerings, you can use Holochain to deploy an application without provisioning or maintaining server infrastructure. Back-end code consists of stateless functions that can call other functions and receive data from external services.

Key differences:

  • Holochain does not create a serverless abstraction on top of cloud servers—there are no servers at all. Instead, each user hosts both back-end and front-end code on their own device.
  • Public data is stored in a graph database engine provided by the Holochain runtime.
  • Functions are executed only when an individual user says so, and only its local state is affected. This state may then be optionally published to the public graph database so it can be accessed by others.
  • Back-end code is typically deployed to interested users as a package of functions. However, a function can call another function in another package if both packages are installed on one user’s device.

BitTorrent, Dat, Git, GUN, IPFS, Secure Scuttlebutt, and other peer-to-peer (P2P) or distributed web (DWeb) technologies?

Holochain is part of a new breed of P2P DWeb technologies. It builds an offline-friendly, ‘agent-centric’, peer-to-peer network on top of cryptographic primitives, similarly to Dat, Git, IPFS, and Secure Scuttlebutt. As a full application development stack with built-in assumptions about user identity, data propagation, and data retrieval, it’s most similar to Secure Scuttlebutt.

Key differences:

  • Holochain is meant for application development, whereas BitTorrent, Dat, Git, and IPFS are simply data persistence and propagation layers on which applications can be built.
  • Holochain is opinionated about back-end languages and frameworks, whereas Secure Scuttlebutt allows developers to choose their own.
  • Holochain is optimized for persistent identity, whereas BitTorrent and IPFS allow for some anonymity.

What’s next?

As our ecosystem matures:

  • We will release new core features and improve our SDK for more efficient development.
  • We’ll build drop-in libraries for user and role management, authorization, fast querying, efficient data management, and more.
  • We will create applications for private data backup, user profile management, and package distribution.
  • We’ll launch an app store that allow users with the Holochain runtime to install, run, and update apps with just a few clicks.
  • We will launch a distributed application hosting marketplace called Holo Host to connect traditional web users with Holochain applications.

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