The Initial Community Offering for Holo, a shared hosting network built on a Holochain architecture, has seen a surge in contributions over the past week.
The ICO had raised 1,469 ETH, 719 ETH, and 2,797 ETH in its first, second, and third weeks. The sudden increase in contributions saw over 3,600 ETH pour in in just the first four days of the fourth week.
The reasons behind this increase are not known, but it has been an active week for the Holo community. There have been meetups and hackathons continuing on four continents. The Bay Area meetups are sponsored by Mozilla, and Jim Cook, the CFO of Mozilla, recently described Holo as “way ahead of the game”.
This increase in contributions has been matched by an increase in the value of ether, which is up about 33% since the start of this week, meaning the project’s raise has grown from €3.5 million on April 19, to around €8.6 million now.
The ICO is selling tokens that can be used to buy Holo fuel, the native token of a distributed hosting network. Holo will allow users to rent out their spare hard drive space in exchange for Holo fuel, while others can pay to have their files and websites stored on the distributed hosting ecosystem. This will enable efficient and resilient data hosting, and is necessary infrastructure towards the broader Holochain vision of a secure, distributed computing environment.
What makes Holo unique is its use of the Holochain architecture, which has been in development for more than ten years. Holochain provides the same data integrity properties as blockchains, but is able to do it at a much lower cost by circumventing the need for universal consensus. Real-world benchmarking suggests that Ethereum apps ported onto Holochain will be about 10,000 times cheaper to run.
At the time of writing, the ICO has raised over 16,000 ether from at least 948 participants in 73 countries on six continents. It closes at 10 a.m. GMT on April 28.