This week in the Holoverse | Week ending 8th of August 2021

Testing of the Holo hosting infrastructure continues and it’s all going better than expected at this stage of development. The team has increased the number of people who can test through their Web browsers to approximately 250.

Only a few small bugs that aren’t noticeable in the user experience have been found and they are getting fixed now.

It’s fast. The best news is that the messages in the first hApp (Holochain App) Elemental Chat are being received quickly. The good news doesn’t end there as it’s about to get even faster than that. Sharding of the DHT (Distributed Hash Table) is a key piece of functionality and also increases the speed of hApps. The development work for it is completed and will be included in the next version of Holochain. Version 0.0.103. Once this happens this key functionality will supercharge hApps.

Properly test sharding kept that functionality out of version 0.0.102 of Holochain which was released during the week. Amongst the changes in the latest version is functionality that enables developers to be able to code hApps on Windows. There’s still work before Holochain is officially supported on Windows, but this is a big step towards it.

What’s the next Holochain dev work?

A little while ago Arthur Brock (Co-Founder) mentioned in an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on Reddit that Holochain was about 2 months away from Beta. With the sharding of the DHT now in testing you might be wondering what are the big pieces need before Holochain could be considered in beta?

During the week Paul d’Aoust from Holochain let us know that the last big piece remaining is the immune system. Holochain already has the ability to detect when somebody using a hApp has done something wrong. The immune system will take the needed action to protect others when they do that.

It’s important to note that this is the last big piece of work before Holochain can consider being in Beta. There’s more work on the Holo hosting roadmap before Holo and HoloFuel will be in beta.

Buy and sell HOT on Orion Protocol

During the week HOT tokens became tradable on the Orion distributed exchange.

This is particularly big news if you live in the US and haven’t been able to buy HOT. Using Orion regardless of where you live you can now buy HOT. Of course, you’ll be able to exchange HOT that you buy through Orion or any other exchange for HoloFuel when it becomes available when Holo hosting enters Beta.

To purchase HOT on Orion you’ll need USDT. USDT is a stable coin that is tied to the US Dollar. You can purchase it on another exchange or swap a range of other crypto assets (including Ethereum and Bitcoin) on the Orion Swap page.

Before you can trade on Orion, you’ll need to connect a wallet. Orion supports a number of popular wallets such as Metamask, Trezor and Ledger. For security reasons we strongly recommend purchasing, trading or even spending crypto on one wallet and then transferring it to another wallet for storage. You can learn all about storing HOT on a Trezor hardware wallet here.

Once you’ve connected your wallet and have your USDT you can exchange your USDT for HOT on Orion here.

Beyond the ability to trade HOT on Orion this partnership looks like it is going to grow further. Plenty more in the partnership announcement video below.