<aside> <img src="/icons/table_lightgray.svg" alt="/icons/table_lightgray.svg" width="40px" /> Table of contents
</aside>
Holochain is an open source digital framework designed for creating applications that operate in a distributed, peer to peer manner beyond centralized servers and beyond blockchains — they in fact refer to themselves as building the “post-blockchain” paradigm.
Their protocol allows each user, or “agent”, to have their own secure, private piece of the network, and their interactions create a collective digital space. Holochain applications can range from social networks to financial systems, focusing on giving users more control and protecting their privacy. It’s notoriously difficult to understand the technical functioning of this new infrastructure model as it’s quite new and complex, but after 5-6 years of work, started in 2016, the framework is now ready to be used and (h)apps are being tested for a variety of use cases.
Holochain is on CER as it’s one of the most ambitious technological project we know of, promising to make the internet truly distributed, beyond blockchain decentralization as we know it today, which has its cases and benefits but we believe will be overcome by architectures as Holochain in the long run. Despite this far-fetched perspective the founders -which have been involved in community currencies since the nineties!- managed to attract substantial funding and attention, counting on an established global community, and it’s already possible to develop apps with their framework.