Holochain: A New Link in Web3

Holochain provides blockchains with auditable applications that can be tied to on-chain transactions, opening new possibilities for NFTs, DAO communities, and more.

We’ve developed a proof of concept for binding together Holochain agent keys with public keys on blockchains. Holochain uses a system of source chain validation to ensure that any action taken in an application is auditable, creating a secure environment for most application needs. By binding a Holochain agent with a public key in the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), data created by the Holochain agent can be associated with the EVM key. This setup allows for unforgeable and bidirectional verifiability, facilitating provenance confirmation on both Ethereum and Holochain.

Rather than storing NFT payloads in unvalidated and/or centralized storage, with Holochain you can create and validate the payload and the reference for an NFT fully within a distributed context. The demo below shows that you can also manage the minting and transfer of the NFT from a Holochain app precisely because you can first bind your wallet to your Holochain agent. By storing payloads for NFTs in Holochain, you can circumnavigate the storage limits of blockchain, providing a more validated and ultimately more dynamic solution than other current implementations like IPFS.

Combining patterns from oracles and notaries with agent binding on Holochain opens up new ways to move between peer-to-peer systems via “cross-chain” proofs.

Smart contracts pre-authorize the public keys of agents from whom they will accept proofs. The proofs are signed verifications that reference actions or decisions taken in Holochain, all of which are also transparent and verifiable by any member of the application. This enables scalable but still verifiable sensemaking.

An example of how this could be used is with DAOs. Large scale voting on-chain is costly, both in gas fees and network traffic. But a voting app on Holochain can provide the trust and transparency of blockchain without the gas fees, and then the fully verifiable decision can be notarized creating a proof which is used to make a single on-chain transaction. The cost savings to both individual DAO members and the organization as a whole are potentially immense. This also provides greater flexibility as DAO’s can now afford to conduct all of their business in validated environments.

Explore other benefits Holochain brings to DAOs.

Given the two examples above, you can see that what Holochain provides to blockchains is validated data storage. While the examples given talk about two major concerns for current blockchain development, you can store or interact with any data you choose to program into an application. Holochain is an incredibly flexible framework — the validation rules of each application can be customized based on the security and design needs of a particular use case. The combination of energy and cost efficiency, auditability, and flexibility makes Holochain a perfect choice for applications that need to interface with blockchain.

Plus, it’s all coded in Rust — with UIs using your favorite JavaScript framework — making it even easier for Ethereum devs to use and build with.

Learn how Holochain can extend Web3, and get involved by introducing yourself to our team and community on Discord or by joining one of our upcoming events.

Originally published on the Holochain Blog on February 8, 2024.