Who is Holochain For?

Holochain is a smart choice if:

  • Your application needs to be accessible despite unreliable network conditions or total loss of connectivity.
  • You want adaptive security that minimizes the impact of data breaches and automatically responds to attacks.
  • You want to see your application scale automatically and cheaply with user adoption.
  • You want to meet strong privacy requirements (e.g., GDPR and HIPAA) without much hassle.
  • You want to respect the privacy and agency of your users.
  • You want to equip your user communities to own their infrastructure—without having to become system admins.
  • You’re exploring more ethical business models and want technology that makes it affordable to embody your values.
  • You’re ready to trade some control for technology that puts your users first.
  • You’ve tried blockchain, but found it slow, expensive, and hard to tweak for your governance and permissioning needs.

Holochain might not be ideal if:

  • You need true real-time performance—while Holochain has speed advantages over blockchain and in some cases even client/server models, it’s optimized for resilience, not immediacy.
  • You want an always consistent view of data—Holochain is designed for eventual consistency and availability of read/write operations, not guaranteed consistency.
  • Your business model depends on capture and analysis of user data—Holochain spreads data out over many nodes.
  • You expect to maintain global oversight over data—Holochain apps empower participants to contribute their own perspectives to a shared data pool.
  • You need to maintain a single, authoritative timeline of all events, as with blockchain—Holochain allows individual agents to maintain their own timelines that intersect with each other at key moments.
  • You’re building a token-based cryptocurrency—while this is possible with Holochain, it goes against its design due to the need for token-based systems’ need for single authoritative ledgers.

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