I got curious on Holochain and did some researching. Seems like a very interesting and powerful project based on everything that’s been written on it. So here’s a brief from an article from www.captainaltcoin.com which kinds of explains it but will still shroud it in mystery, for the moment at least. The information before are excerpts I find useful taken from https://captainaltcoin.com/what-is-the-potential-worth-of-holochain-hot-tokens/ by the way.

So What is Holochain?

Holochain represents an alternative for blockchain technology that provides its users with distributed (NOT decentralized) computing and applications using HoloPorts. HoloPorts allow the network to scale due to the network load being offloaded across all of the nodes linked to the network. Holoports are basically the network nodes of this project that are optimized for hosting the network and need to be purchased directly from the project; while they currently come as preset hardware, the Holo team did promise that in the future people will be able to install Holo software on their own hardware.

“The structure is different, so it’s not about having a distributed ledger that everybody is connecting to; it’s about having individual source chains that are validated against each other and checked against their neighbors, so there’s a sufficiency rather than everybody having to get on.”

So how do you use this Holochain?

If you want to use the Holochain network and its applications you must contribute computing resources to the network. The network doesn’t depend on centralized servers and instead functions on the peer to peer (P2P) principle; this means that the data is sharded throughout the network, and if a single node goes offline the data can be accessed from other nodes, a technology that functions similarly to torrenting.

“Every node has its own chain, its own source chain, and all of the changes that it contributes to the system are signed to its chain and then shared to sort of distributed GitHub, if you will. But it’s a DHT, which is the technology that BitTorrent uses.”

The network is therefore not dependent on trusted third parties nor does it have centralized points of failure.

So where’s the cryptocurrency in all these?

HoloTokens are ERC20 ICO tokens that will be redeemable for Holo fuel (a mutual credit currency, not a token) within the project’s ecosystem. The redeeming will begin once the Holo mainnet launches (community expects this to happen in Q4 of 2018). Holo fuel is backed by the networks distributed computing and hosting services. Application creators will need Holo fuel to pay for hosting services. To earn Holo fuel you can do something called “Proof-Of-Service” by providing processing power, bandwidth and storage space. You will be able to exchange your Holo Fuel for other cryptocurrencies and national currencies.

For full article you can visit the link in the introduction at the start of this article.