Comparisons

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DISCLAIMER: This page compares Holochain to various other decentralized data protocols and systems. We can't guarantee the accuracy of claims made on this page about projects or software other than Holochain. The purpose of this page is to further your understanding Holochain by comparing it to other projects you might already be familiar with, not to teach you about those other projects. To learn about those other projects, please review their resources instead; links to their websites and white papers are provided.

Comparisons

• Hashgraph
• IOTA
• Substatum
• IPFS
• ECSA
• Urbit
• Radix
• Byteball
• DAT Project
• DADI
• Todachain
• Scuttlebutt
• Maidsafe
• Blockstack
• EOS

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Holochain itself

Website
White paper
Codebase

Decentralized architecture	dApp environment	Secure hash chains	Application-level data integrity	Scaling	Open source
✔	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔

Holochain is unique in that it utilized DHTs for collective data storage (?). Holochain also has a working Alpha version with a suite of working prototype and proof-of-concept apps.

Hashgraph

Meta status: 2

Website
White paper

Decentralized architecture	dApp environment	Secure hash chains	Application-level data integrity	Scaling	Open source
✔	✔	✔	✔	✔	✘

Hashgraph: Here's a nice post about the differences between Holochain and Hashgraph: https://www.quora.com/Goodbye-Blockchain-Hello-Hashgraph-Is-that-true-if-hashgraph-becomes-open-source-What-about-holochain/answer/Matthew-Schutte?srid=h0bQI

In short, Holochain is open source and agent centric, and Hashgraph is proprietary and data-centric. Hashgraph seems to be trying to do distributed global-consensus but do it much faster. With Holochain, we've skirted the limitations of global consensus by using a faster and more adaptable system.

Like blockchain, Hashgraph is a method of generating global consensus. We believe global consensus is neither necessary nor desirable in most use cases and so have designed Holochain as a tool for the vast majority of human interactions that require less than global consensus. But more importantly, Holochain wasn’t designed to merely record a history of transactions, it was designed to create a broader infrastructure for facilitating social coordination via powerful, truly distributed apps. (You could say the same for IOTA, Stellar, and similar projects.) Also, Holochain is open source and Hashgraph is not.

IOTA

Meta status: 2

Website
White paper

Decentralized architecture	dApp environment	Secure hash chains	Application-level data integrity	Scaling	Open source
✔	✔	✘	✔	✔	✘

IOTA (like many of the blockchain alternatives) is still limited to a transaction ledger. It does not do generalized computing or run distributed applications. It has one app - tokenization - and instead of having a single chain of blocks that everyone agrees on, it uses a more chaotic pattern, called the tangle, to ensure multiple nodes/people are still validating most transactions. The tangle is a DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) instead of a chain, which still links hashes, but has multiple possible paths through its history. This allows IOTA to reduce some of the bottlenecks of having a single global ledger, because there are multiple "tops" to the tangle that you can connect your transaction(s) to. When enough others follow your path through to your new transactions, and build new ones on top of those, they will be considered validated and become a part of the the tangle's history.

Anyway... I don't think they've solved the problem of general computing. Both IOTA and Hashgraph are sort of partial steps from one single blockchain reality toward holochain. But they are still focused on data-centric consensus.

Substratum

Meta status: 3

Website
White paper

Decentralized architecture	dApp environment	Secure hash chains	Application-level data integrity	Scaling	Open source

IPFS

Meta status: 3

Website
White paper

Holochain is a platform for distributed applications. IPFS is a platform/protocol for distributed file storage. It's possible that some Holochain apps will use IPFS for large, static file storage. The current alpha version of Holochain uses the libp2p library that underlies IPFS. Future versions may not.

ECSA

Meta status: 3

Website
White paper

Decentralized architecture	dApp environment	Secure hash chains	Application-level data integrity	Scaling	Open source
✔	✔	✘	✔	✘	✘

Urbit

Meta status: 3

Website
White paper

Decentralized architecture	dApp environment	Secure hash chains	Application-level data integrity	Scaling	Open source
✔	✔	✘	✔	✔	✔

Radix

Meta status: 3

Website
White paper

Decentralized architecture	dApp environment	Secure hash chains	Application-level data integrity	Scaling	Open source
✔	✔	✔	✔	✔	✘

Byteball

Meta status: 3

Website
White paper

Decentralized architecture	dApp environment	Secure hash chains	Application-level data integrity	Scaling	Open source
✘	✘	✔	✔	✔	✘

DAT Project

Meta status: 3

Website
White paper

Decentralized architecture	dApp environment	Secure hash chains	Application-level data integrity	Scaling	Open source

DADI

Meta status: 3

Website
White paper

Decentralized architecture	dApp environment	Secure hash chains	Application-level data integrity	Scaling	Open source

Todachain

Meta status: 3

Website
White paper

Decentralized architecture	dApp environment	Secure hash chains	Application-level data integrity	Scaling	Open source
✔	✘	✘	✘	✔	✘

Scuttlebutt

Meta status: 3

Website
Codebase

Decentralized architecture	dApp environment	Secure hash chains	Application-level data integrity	Scaling	Open source

Maidsafe

Meta status: 2

Website
White paper

Decentralized architecture	dApp environment	Secure hash chains	Application-level data integrity	Scaling	Open source

Hey Chris, I can see why you'd make that comparison. First off, though, know that you don't have to buy a piece of hardware. You can close your eyes to the crowdfund and participate by simply downloading Holochain and installing the Holo app and participate using nothing but your own hardware.

Though, there's a good reason that we (full disclosure) are selling hardware. It actually highlights some other differences between Holo and Maidsafe. Where Maidsafe tethers a coin and mining to information and data stored, which requires speculation on large-scale adoption, Holo’s projections are based on estimates from the crowdsale of hosting boxes. Holo provides dedicated hardware specifically in order to be able to make these projections accurate. MaidSafe's estimate of mining rate over time depend on totally unexplained assumptions about the speed of network adoption and the amount of data stored. On Holo there is no mining and no tokens. This is because Holo fuel is a mutual credit currency that assigns credit limits according to a host's record of hosting services performed.

Another thing about Maidsafe is that they give no explanation in their whitepaper about their “transaction manager”, which is the underlying fabric that makes their entire system work. Holo’s underlying architecture, Holochain, is quite transparently detailed all over the web. https://holochain.org/

The tip that Maidsafe does give about this transaction manager? The fact that they reward what they call 'farmers' (hosts) in a random fashion, which to me speaks volumes about their architecture. Holochain does not need to reward randomly (a la the mining lottery on blockchain) because it can account for each micro-transaction of hosting provision through its crypto-accounting engine. Maidsafe is completely opaque about their consensus process, whereas Holo need not rely on consensus because mutual credit only requires that transactors authenticate their local transaction by auditing each other's source chain to ensure that they have the credits they're spending.

SAFE also creates its own web browser and requires that adopters download it. Holo was made to allow mainstream net users to access distributed apps through already existing web browsers. The difference is an intent to popularize distributed applications versus the intent to have people create a bunch of new web pages. It’s just a different emphasis. It comes down to whether you’re more interested in encryption and anonymity in all circumstances, which SAFE optimizes, or community engines that fit membranes and identity depending on the purpose of the application. I think of it as the difference between furthering the individual-user perspective of the current net or developing a sense of applications-as-communities, more in the spirit of platform co-ops (many of which rely on user identity).

Another difference? They take a ton of VC, and so they don't need a crowdsale (even though, to competitively mine Safecoin, one would likely need to buy a ton of hardware from some other provider).

Yet another? Male to female ratio of the team: Maidsafe 20:3, Holo 19:9.

Blockstack

Meta status: 3

Website
White paper

Decentralized architecture	dApp environment	Secure hash chains	Application-level data integrity	Scaling	Open source
✔	✔	✔	✔	?	✔

EOS

Website
White paper

Decentralized architecture	dApp environment	Secure hash chains	Application-level data integrity	Scaling	Open source

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