This week in the Holoverse | Week ending 11th of July 2021

This week the Holo hosting team gave us some big insights into some of what they’ve been up to.

Three networks have been developed for alpha period:

1. devNet – A not for public use network used by the development team.
2. flexNet – This network will be for the next Pre-release tests of Elemental Chat and developers will have access to data to help troubleshoot.
3. alphaNet – We haven’t seen any public announcements about this network, but we assume this network will closely resemble the mainNet that will be brought online at Holo hosting beta time.

150+ HoloPort owners have signed up for the HoloPort Alpha program that was announced last week. This means there will be over 150 HoloPorts on the flexNet network soon. A big leap from the approximately 30 HoloPorts on the current test network.

100-200 people that don’t own HoloPorts are going to be invited to test Elemental Chat through their Web browser over the next week or so. What this means is that people without a HoloPort will be able to enter a URL into their Web browser as they would any other Website and then be able to test Elemental Chat. If you are new to learning about Holochain and Holo hosting you may not be aware yet that Elemental Chat is the first hApp being tested on Holo. Elemental Chat is paving the way for future hApps like HoloFuel and the ever-increasing list of community developed hApps.

Internally these tests have been working successfully for the last month or so. So it’s now time to take the next step and greatly increase traffic using the first truly P2P serverless network ever developed. It’s hard to quantify what a big milestone this is. What many have said was impossible is now a reality.

Up until this point the development has been working on something revolutionary with the hope that it would work. Development work that happens after this point is making something that is real and tangible even better.

But wait there’s more

What we’ve already mentioned is big news, but this week the team delivered even more for us to digest.

On the Holochain front, the work on sharding the DHT continues. If you haven’t heard of these terms before that’s ok. The DHT or Distributed Hash Table in Holochain hApps ensures consistency of data. Each person that uses a Holochain hApp writes their data to their own personal chain and that is then published to the DHT. The DHT is like a record of what data was published. So if anybody tries to tamper with the data they are proved to be fraudulent. This already exists in Holochain, but the sharding of the DHT breaks all of this data up into tiny little pieces that move around the network in the most efficient way possible. It’s much like how BitTorrent works. Recently a new technology called SQLite was introduced which has enabled intense testing and moved this part of the development work forward.

An important part of reaching the world-changing goals of the Holochain and Holo projects is fostering a healthy developer community. You’d be pressed hard to find another project at this stage of its development with as many developers already building applications with the tech. The Holochain Launcher that has just been announced will make it even easier to build hApps. Developers that use the Holochain Launcher will quickly be able to make a simple hApp that has both the DNA and User Interface (UI) all ready to develop further.

In an announcement that illustrates how ready the tech is as well as how healthy the developer community is, the first community hApp has been tested on the Holo hosting network. We look forward to hearing more about this hApp in the not so distant future.

Reddit AMA

This week Arthur Brock (Co-Founder) and David Atkinson (Commercial Director) from the Holochain project answered questions in an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on the altStreetBets Reddit. We recommend people go have a look by visiting the AMA on altStreetBets. We’ve also taken a few screenshots of some of what was said below.

The Holochain and Holo teams have said numerous times that they don’t provide estimated timeframes for the development roadmap. Because of that, you could be surprised to see in those screenshots that Arthur Brock gave time estimations for Beta releases. Holochain Beta in the next few months and the target for Holo hosting Beta target is before the end of 2021.