Holo Network Updated to Holochain Beta

• Holo Roadmap and Progress

• Holo Alpha Network — current state and upcoming change

• Holochain Beta 0.2.0 Release Dates

• Growth: Dev Education & Holochain Events

Over the past months we focused on launching and testing the Beta 0.1.x version of Holochain. We have also progressed Holo development and want to share that with you now. We updated the roadmap and you can see that we marked three milestones as complete. 

1. Hosting Invoices and Payments 
2. HoloFuel Countersigning
3. Holo Platform updated to Holochain Beta

All of the dev work is complete for these milestones. This has been integrated and released together and our QA and delivery teams are busy testing all of it. This includes a lot more than might be obvious given the names of the milestones. Some of the features and required testing for this integrated release include the following:

• A revamped Springboard site for Holo registration and account management

• Host Console updates for invoice management

• Publisher Portal updates for invoice management

• Publisher Registration and hApp Publishing on the new version of Holochain

• Our first alpha release of the HoloFuel app with countersigning 

• HoloFuel performance and reliability testing

• Log generation of data transferred by host nodes (bandwidth service logs)

• Automatic hosting invoice creation and sending

• Publisher auto payments

• Internal tools for user management and HP Alpha Program administration

• hApps have a method for DNA cloning

These updates are not all available yet to the folks using the Alpha network. When we moved Holo hosting into the Alpha network, we mentioned that from time to time we would need to clear it and redeploy everything newly. We will be doing exactly that in the next week or two after we finish our integrated testing. At that point all the changes we’ve completed as part of the last few milestones will become visible to Alpha hosts and publishers.

But let’s talk about what has been going on in the current version of the Alpha network. For months now, distributed Holochain applications have been running successfully in pre-Holochain Beta versions on the Holo Alpha network. They are still running. Mewsfeed (previously Clutter) is one of those applications. This application in particular has been an awesome demo tool that we’ve even been using to introduce more and more developers to Holochain at build events.

Hundreds of people have signed up and used the Mewsfeed application. It has been hosted on all of the active HoloPorts in the Alpha network and continues to perform reliably. If you haven’t seen it — it is a Twitter-like app where cats mew, with basic functionality enabled that lets you follow people, see connections, and send direct messages. This has been a great test of a long-lived application running on Holochain and Holo.

When we deploy all the new updates to the Holo Alpha network, Mewsfeed and all the other applications that are still running on the Alpha network will be deprecated and their publishers will need to republish new versions that have been updated to Holochain Beta.

In January we launched Holochain Beta 0.1.0. We’re now preparing the next major release of Holochain where we are introducing key features to enhance the security and reliability of the Holochain framework. This includes advanced network security, warrants, user experience improvements that provide better network information, and improved system validation to make networking more secure and reliable.

Holochain Beta 0.1.x will continue to be supported for the full six months promised, including necessary bootstrap and proxy services. This will provide time for developers to update to Beta 0.2.0 without facing a break in support. 

We’ll be following the same pattern we did for the first release by doing a release candidate in advance of the actual release. Below are the dates the team has established for the final RC and Beta 0.2.0.

13 April, 2023 — Holochain 0.2.0-beta-rc 

27 April, 2023 — Holochain Beta 0.2.0

The toolchain updates, including an updated version of the Holochain launcher, will be released in early May. This will include a fully tested version of the scaffolding tool and initial applications available in the launcher.

You can check out the Holochain roadmap which has minor updates to see progress.

Rounding out this post is our update on the product marketing launch of Holochain which has been underway since early February when the tooling for the first beta release of Holochain became available. 

Our growth strategy includes developer first activities and business development activities. Using the scaffolding tool in the latest versions of Holochain, it is now possible to build a distributed peer-to-peer application in a day. This has enabled a new type of in person event for us. These “dApp in a day“ events have let us interact directly with new developers and iterate on the best ways to quickly have folks wrap their heads around the innovation of designing for agent centricity and serverless tech.

We have also iterated on the Developer Education program based on the physical training intensive we offered in Austria last summer. Just last weekend, we hosted a project demo call where the cohort of devs that attended the recent online 4 day Online Developer Training shared the apps and architecture patterns they have been designing. To say it was spectacular would be an understatement. The clarity participants demonstrated for how Holochain can be used in all manner of new implementations for social media, digital identity, and distributed finance is breathtaking.

In the coming weeks and months we’ll begin offering more and more self-paced and online developer events. We are also attending conferences like GDC 2023, MozFest, and others; and we had a presence at GeoWeek 2023 as well as the AWSF Open Source Forum for motion picture development earlier in the year. In June our team will also be sponsoring and attending DWeb Camp 2023. Follow us on your favorite social channel to stay connected to where we’ll be and how you can meet with us on the ground as we take Holochain Beta into the world.