Holochain Partners with Rainlang

We are thrilled to announce this partnership between Holochain and Rainlang. While we have been interwoven efforts for some time, making it official before heading to ETHDenver 2024 feels like an important step forwards in our collaboration.

What is Rainlang? Rainlang is a framework that aims to simplify smart contracts and make them more accessible to a wider audience. The aim of making smart contracts accessible to everyone comes from the belief that accessibility is the difference between theoretical and practical decentralization.

By combining Holochain’s framework for building peer-to-peer apps with Rainlang’s easy to use smart contracts, new groundbreaking solutions in the Web3 space are possible, unleashing opportunities and possibilities for developers, enterprises, and users alike.

DeFi has exploded in recent years, but it is still a challenging space, accessible to the few, not the many. Rainlang’s work to make smart contracts more legible is an important step to democratizing this space. But there are still hurdles. 

When we interact with smart contracts, we usually do so through a website. This is a point of centralization that introduces several risks, from phishing to DNS hacks. Plus, nothing stops a website from being taken down, either by the company running it or by a government, DDOS attack, or otherwise. The solution? Truly distributed applications, running on your device, interacting as a network of peers. This is what Holochain provides to DeFi, the opportunity for the infrastructure supporting the EVM to also be decentralized, secure, and verifiable. 

The Rain Orderbook is an on-chain orderbook contract that enables users to deploy complex strategies for managing token trades. Using Holochain, the Rainlang team is building a decentralized platform where Orderbook users can share draft trading strategies, simulations, tests of strategies, and even raw financial data. This will make the trading tools of Orderbook more accessible as a community grows around them. 

Building this platform on Holochain enables a collaborative platform that runs directly on user’s devices without data sitting on a third party server. This is a truly decentralized stack that maintains options for privacy where trading groups can make private spaces to share their trading strategies etc. With this user centric design that provides security from many common hacks in the crypto space, we can start to see new potential for Web3.

For the last several months we have been experimenting with integrating Rainlang contracts into the stack of Holochain applications. Fractal Tribute demonstrated a Rainlang contract on the Polygon EVM, connected to a Holochain application where users played a collaborative art game. Holo was used to provide read-only access to the game, both for OpenSea to access the art and for a website that allowed for public viewership of the game.

This is just one demonstration of how Rainlang can be used to connect Holochain apps to the blockchain. We are excited to see what others develop — pairing the financial markets and global consensus of EVMs with the agent-centric networks of Holochain.

We have more in the works. In the meantime, read about more of the solutions we envision, and maybe we’ll see you at ETHDenver 2024?

Originally published on the Holochain Blog on February 21, 2024.