Diving headfirst into the world of data decentralization and peer-to-peer (P2P) empowerment with our special guest, Mary Camacho, the visionary Executive Director at Holochain. Throughout the episode, Mary Camacho dissects the transformative potential of Holochain applications and their role in reshaping the landscape of peer-to-peer applications. We explore how this framework empowers developers to create secure, reliable, and lightning-fast P2P applications, while granting users greater control over their data and interactions.

Join us as we unravel the synergies of proven technology, visionary thinking, and the drive towards a decentralized digital future. If you're curious about the next evolution in blockchain technology and the power it places in your hands, this is an episode you won't want to miss.

Holochain - Decentralizing data with P2P power

Participants:

• Jason Fernandes (Co-founder of AdLunam)

• Mary Camacho (Executive Director at Holochain)

00:22

Jason

Alrighty, hello. Hello. Welcome to Diving into Crypto. This is your host, Jason Fernandes, co-founder of AdLunam. This program is about sharing insights, strategies, journeys of the thought leaders, movers, shakers and of course, candlestick washers. So this program is brought to you by AdLunam, the all in one Web3 investment ecosystem empowering, early stage startups from tokenomics, community growth, VC fundraising, IDO launches, and of course, unique Engage to Earn platform. We're transforming the way that investors experience the world of Web3 investing and dynamic NFTs. Through our monthly Web3 pitch arena, we are also bridging the gap between innovative startups and venture capital. So let's dive right into it.

01:10

Jason

Before we begin, there are a few announcements. Views on this program belong to those of the speaker and thoughts shared are meant for educational purposes only. Feel free to use the reaction buttons as you hear gems from our speakers. At the end of the program we'll open it up for QnAs, your questions can be sent across to our Twitter account at AdLunam Inc. So today we have a really interesting guest, Mary Camacho of Holochain. Mary is a social scientist by education with a master's degree from the University of Chicago. She's been a leader, founder and executive in the telecom firms for over 20 years and has advised many startups in strategy, funding and product development. Of course, most of you all know her for her work at Holochain, Holo has of course built a peer to peer application framework. Of course, Holochain, which is driving innovation at the edge with P2P marketplaces for cloud hosting services.

02:13

Jason

Mary, if you could maybe unmute and perhaps introduce yourself, I'm sure everybody else would love to hear from you as well.

02:22

Mary

Hello, thanks for having me Jason, and it's a pleasure to be here today and chat with you guys. So yeah, as you guys know, I've been the Executive Director of the Holochain Foundation and also the CEO of Holo. Holochain is the framework for building truly peer to peer distributed applications and this is something that works without the need for incentive tokenization. So it's a little different than a lot of the other blockchain type technologies out there, but it works really great as a companion technology to what things are, you know, to a lot of the projects that are working out there in the space today. And then Holo is actually pre launched still. Holo is a hosting platform built on Holochain. And Holo is about connecting those truly peer to peer applications, which by default don't work on our current Internet, which is quite centralized.

03:20

Mary

And it bridges them so that folks can be on the internet as well as peer to peer, direct offline and still be connecting with other folks. Because the whole world hasn't moved to that new way of networking yet. So yeah, that's kind of what I'm up to and I'm really thrilled to be here talking about how data can be more decentralized and use truly peer to peer power.

03:48

Jason

Awesome. Yeah, I've been actually following Holochain for a while. I just checked. Turns out I think I connected with you on LinkedIn maybe a couple of years ago when it first came up on my radar. One of the things I thought was interesting, and again, correct me if I'm wrong, but from what I understand, the difference between sort of Holochain and traditional blockchain is while blockchain more records a transaction, Holochain actually sort of shares the data itself. So blockchain requires confidence in the central authority, which is the miners. Whereas with Holochain, the people actually have access to the data itself on a peer to peer system without needing to sort of trust minus to have verified that data and just that it's okay. Is that about right? Is Holo built off adapt, built on Holochain?

04:42

Mary

Yeah, let me try to dive into that a little bit. So definitely you've got the right thinking approach to what you're saying. Holochain is a data integrity engine. It really is that. It flips how we think of data in the sense that it starts from the user's perspective. So every piece of data that enters a Holochain application starts with an individual agent putting data into the system. And it basically happens locally and then gets distributed or published into what is the shared space that the application has. That kind of throws everything on its head really, because almost whether it's blockchain or whether it's any other application platform or ways that we think about building applications in the world today, data is centralized, data goes into a database. We have all these ways of thinking about it, even the ways that we know to design systems start with data in the middle and data is primary.

05:49

Mary

And with Holochain we're saying no, users are primary agents, people are primary and all data actually has provenance from an agent. And so it really transforms the way we can architect processes, the way that we can solve collaboration issues. Everything really is kind of turned on its head a little bit now. The question you asked about validation and miners, that's true. It doesn't require a different set of people doing validation in order to have the centralized data be valid, but it does have a validation mechanism and that is that everybody who is a participant in an application is also the validator of the data. So when you put your data in to your own source chain, it's considered valid by default on your source chain. But when you publish it out into the shared space, it gets validated by others. And that means that they have basically the set of rules that you have about the applications.

06:56

Mary

07:46

Jason

Yeah, go ahead. So a random set of peers is basically selected. So even though everybody is in theory a validator, only a random sort of selection is chosen. And based off of that, is the transaction validated?

08:01

Mary

Yeah. And a transaction. Yes. And it continues on because it continues to be gossiped and you can have things that cause validation errors at different points. But the big difference here is that Holochain is built to serve all sorts of different purposes. We're not just talking about money in the construct of tokens and those types of transactions. A lot of things that you might be validating are basically just that somebody is chatting in a chat app or somebody is playing a game and they took a move in a game, or somebody is drawing something in a collaborative canvas within a group of people. So everything that's happening in an application is cryptographically signed by the person, by the agent who's putting that data into the system. And then everybody is doing the validation on that. And when it goes out there, each application can have a different kind of set of validation rules.

09:04

Mary

You literally could configure an application, have everybody have to validate, and it could be 100% validation. It's just that not every application requires that.

09:13

Jason

That it would just basically slow down the system and sort of lead to redundancies and things. Correct.

09:21

Mary

Yeah. The thing is that I think you might be thinking about it a little bit different because data is not in the center of it all and isn't considered.

09:32

Jason

Just out of curiosity, I know we talked about, we jumped right into the technology. Right. But we sure did also about sort of how you got into this. What was the sort of moment that.

09:49

Mary

Yeah, this goes back a while.

09:54

Jason

Blockchain and Web Three as a technology, like how you actually get interest in the world.

10:00

Mary

11:09

Mary

11:50

Jason

Wow, that's a really interesting journey. What were you doing before web3? What was it sort of prior? Yeah, I'm just curious because a lot of people so one thing I've noticed is that depending on where people come into web three the approach that they take is very different. So for example, people come in from the investment space and then of course they'll be looking at things like launch pads and things. Then you have the developers, they tend to look at layer one chains. So I'm curious, what was the genesis for you?

12:23

Mary

Yeah, well, it's interesting because my role in organizations, I've been a leader and executive in technology organizations since the lot of It has been startup but I've also worked in the enterprise and in the enterprise I worked in telecommunications, I worked in mobile telecommunications and I worked in CDN. And so I often kind of cut across a wide swath of different business units because I had the broader background of the tech plus operations and finance and coming together, I ended up in a lot of product delivery, product development, leadership roles in those years and also having to figure out how do we take something to market? So my product development background is probably the thing that I've leaned on the most, that and the operations. Because really as a company that's doing a lot of R and D, we're trying to put a technology out that just hasn't been built before.

13:25

Mary

We've been iterating on. How do we produce this? How do we get this to market? How do we actually know that this is going to connect all the dots that are needed out there? And how do we have people who've never heard of this work, who don't understand this work? How do we have them wrap their head around it so that they can begin either developing it, delivering it, working in a marketing team, supporting it, because it's not like it's the same as a lot of the layer ones or it's not like it's the same as a lot of the marketplaces that are out there. When you already have models for what something is, it's much easier to bring a team around it and actually generate the alignment, the understanding. And in such a great way, with Holo and Holochain, it has been so community led because it started with purpose and then the purpose really rang true for so many people about what needed to be accomplished.

14:22

Mary

And we just have some incredible technologists that were able to get the initial team building and little by little, it was a word of mouth spread of what was going on and it grew rapidly. In the first year, we did a crowdfunding that was quite successful, and then we did our community offering, which our ICO, and it was a very limited ICO in a lot of ways. We were trying to make sure that the folks who were most engaged in our community had access to it. So were really going against the tide because at the time, it was very much a whale driven type of approach was what everybody was doing. We did no presale ahead of our ICO. It was really focused on giving all the opportunity to the folks who were participating. Like we had the saying were really focused on our crowd.

15:25

Jason

Yeah, no, I mean, it's funny because when you initially answer this question, you were sort of focusing on your product and operations experience. But the one thing that I think about when I think about Holochain is the community, because the community is just so massive and large and engaged. I know building that community would have been massively challenging just in and of itself if you didn't have to worry about anything else, the technology, which is substantial. So I'm curious about that community. And you also mentioned sort of the way you guys chose to do your public sale as being very democratic and not having a private sale at all. And so I'm also interested in learning more about that, because at AdLunam we're a Launchpad, one of the things that's our focus is sort of democratizing access to ideas, because what ends up happening is you have power concentrated in a really small number of people in the crypto space, and retail investors really are never very for, you know?

16:32

Jason

Yeah. You know, for projects that are launching tokens and things. So, yeah, I'm curious how you grew your community and you kept them engaged.

16:39

Mary

Yeah, it's been a journey, really, I think because we started with purpose and let me kind of step back and sort of recontextualize a little bit when Holochain came into this. We were really looking at the Internet. The Internet's broken. There was this idea back in the day of this massive possibility around a democratized Internet. Web1 was about people getting together, connecting. Yes, it has some roots in different academia, defense, all those different things. But when it really started taking off, it was because people were connecting person to person. And you had a lot of things were even and there was this promise of a democratized space online and it was great. And it had challenges in terms of usability, of course. And as those challenges around usability were solved, what we started to see was technologies that built platforms. Well, Platforms was basically Web2.

17:45

Mary

And it kind of transformed the kind of open opportunity space, the democratized space of the Internet, into this closed set of applications where a few people could concentrate power, right? And so for us, when we’re coming at this conversation or this issue of the Internet is broken and something needs to be done, weren't coming at it just with the concept of money needs to be democratized. We were coming at it from the perspective of words. Our agency, our data, our identities, all of this needs to be democratized. And so it kind of was that when you start with something that's so fundamental to what people want, you are able to tap into a core, a set of values, a set of principles that people say, yes, this is what I'm looking for. This is what should be. This is what we want to see more of in the world.

18:52

Mary

And that's where we were as humans, right? That's where this small group of people that started were. It's where the next group of now we're building this thing that has been promised. And yes, we had all the foundations for it. We had much of the work of what the architectures needed to be and the ideas for it, but the challenges of the R and D to get it down and get it built were huge.

19:45

Mary

So when you talk about this as a journey and something we've had to sort of work on over the years, you're absolutely right, because it has been disappointing that it's taken so long in some cases. And aspects of our community have at times been 100% behind everything that's been going on and then other times going, we feel forsaken, we feel lost. And that you're not actually delivering on this promise. And the reality is that we are and to the degree of meeting expectations in time. We haven't always and it's a tough conversation, we can be responsible for it, but it doesn't make it change. And so the world of working with, we even say communities, because it isn't just like one group of people, this amorphous, singular thinking group of people. There's local communities, there's communities that have different affinities, there's different communities of language and geography.

20:50

Mary

And all of these things are part of what welcome and what we really want to foster in the space because it actually lines up even with what we're trying to say is needed, which is that there isn't one place where all the conversations need to be and that everybody needs to align about everything or agree with everybody about everything. There actually is room and necessity for spaces that work for different groups of people to accomplish things, to work together and collaborate. And yes, we need to have interactivity across those things, but they aren't the same and they shouldn't have to all be the same. People can opt into different groups. People can opt into communities that they choose to and operate according to different sets of rules. And this is actually very difficult to do when you have things like social media today, where it's a platform that sets millions of people are all supposed to be on the same platform, abiding by all the same rules as if that's what they want.

22:01

Mary

It's not necessarily so. There's benefits you get from those scales, but there's also so much that you lose in human activity, in human coordination. So with Holochain we're saying, hey, we think it can be done differently. And so a little bit is that we're trying to operate in some of the same ways that we're trying to build systems that will help us operate.

22:27

Jason

That's a really interesting perspective. I noticed that you guys are listed on Binance and Gate, Bybit all these massive exchanges. How do you guys balance the sort of hype cycle? I know what I'm referring to specifically is Holocoin, I believe it's HOT, is a token. Yeah. So how do you guys balance the hype cycle? Because building something is a really substantial thing. It happens very linearly, it's a slow sort of growth. But when you have a token that's being traded on a daily basis, it's almost like you have to manage the hype cycle independently of the development cycle, even though one sort of feeds into the other. I'm just curious what your thoughts are around that.

23:13

Mary

Yeah, well, that gets to the sort of the difficulty and the expectations and setting and all that. One of the things is we've got really clear about our communications in terms of what we’re doing in development. We tried to be very transparent about what was happening in our development cycle, what was being done at every given moment, what were our challenges, where were stuck, where we needed to like where were making breakthroughs, where were hitting milestones. We really didn't jump into the hype game around the token. We've been very careful not to participate in that. We don't play the prospecting games much with our token. Our token is available on a couple of platforms where it can be used to pay for things, but you really don't find it much on platforms that are, for instance, doing staking or things like that. And part of that is that we know that it has a future in our platform when it will be basically become fuel for hosting.

24:23

Mary

And we've been kind of holding out like this is what you're waiting for and we've been kind of guiding people along the process of what it takes to build this. As we go now, certainly as with anything, there have been ups and downs of the token price and we haven't really tried to shift any of that. We don't do anything. We're not out there doing market making, we're not out there trying to kind of lift the price in those ways. We want our token to have value because it's fundamental to what it means to do distributed hosting. And right now we think that's great. It's low because the market's low. It was high when the market was high. We understand that it's being moved by the gravity of the market until Holo hosting is out there in the world working, and then in that shift with that dynamic, it will be really grounded or moved by the gravity of the value of hosting.

25:29

Mary

And so this is the conversation we had. It's what we wrote in our green paper, it's what we said was going to happen. And we just really have been reiterating and maintaining that level of the conversation across the years that we've been building. And it's tough. I'm sure it's not been sufficient for some of the folks who have been token holders at different times during our project. But we also have an incredible loyal community of token holders who know that this is what it takes to build something transformative, this is what it takes to build something real and innovative. And so we're just super grateful for all of the folks in that community and the token holding community that have been with us all this time. So really appreciative.

26:16

Jason

Yeah, it's really unfortunate that there's so much contagion in the industry in that you can have a very legitimate business that's building something and providing value, but then something can hit the market. And all these tokens behave in such a similar manner, almost independent of what their true utility is, original utility is in the first place, or whether that utility still holds. It's really unfortunate. But I mean, you mentioned staking a lot of the companies that sort of focus on staking a lot almost well, there's some that focus on it almost as their entire business strategy. And I think that comes from sort of maybe being a little bit concerned about their own utility in their token. Because a lot of these guys, their token doesn't have any utility at present. And so what they're trying to do is control price by giving it the utility of just staking.

27:20

Jason

Right, but that's not true utility. And I think what you guys want to focus on is you see this as, like you said, fuel for hosting. So that would be similar to.

27:35

Jason

It be very similar to sort of like decentralized web hosts that are coming out? Would that be sort of the hollows part of as a DApp on Holochain?

27:46

Mary

Yeah, basically all Holochain applications. Let me step back because we’re talking about the technology earlier and there was one piece that I didn't say that I think is really important. And what that is that Holochain isn't a single Holochain. Right. Every application is a Holochain. It is the whole thing. And so each application is its own DApp and it doesn't require anything else. You can build it and you can just install it on computers and you can just run it. It doesn't require anything else. It doesn't require the smart contract to be running up on the Internet. It doesn't need that you install it. The only thing that you have to do is have a bootstrap so that you have trusted way for users to come into the application. Yeah, exactly. And that's standard with peer to peer. But once they're in, once they're connected, that's not even something that's required at a centralized level, which is really fabulous.

28:45

Mary

Right. But what it is that a lot of things that we want to do are connected to the Internet. There is a lot of utility to being able to connect functionally usably to the Internet. There's a lot of services, there's a lot. I mean, just think about like receiving an SMS to your phone or doing a notification, connecting into your computer, connecting into APIs oracles and pulling other data into your application. There's so many other ways. So one of the things that Holo as a hosting company will be doing is really providing gateways for peer to peer applications to have access to all those other things that are out there. And it also provides a way to have users who just want to go to a browser because that's what they're used to, it's what they've been doing. Maybe your grandmother doesn't want to install an application she's never heard of and wants to just go up to the browser and type something in and know that this is how I can use the application or talk to my granddaughter or something like that.

29:49

Mary

These are real adoption issues when you're talking about trying to move a world from a centralized approach to something to a completely distributed approach. Right now, a lot of what we're doing with crypto, it really hasn't hit mainstream I mean, yes, there's lots of people involved, but there are real, there are fundamental usability barriers still. And with Holochain, and with some of the work that we're doing that's kind of connected on the side with Holo, we're trying to address some of them. And these include really important things related to identity key management. Because the reality is that the thing that makes crypto hard, the thing that makes DApps hard, the thing that makes even Holochain hard right now is key management. We're talking about cryptographic keys and the management of those keys, and centralized applications and platforms. They've been managing all that for everybody for decades and making it seem easy.

30:56

Mary

We just have also been giving up a lot for them to do it. But when we can make key management be something that individuals can use, then they can truly be in control of all of their systems and they won't be worried that, oh, I just lost my keys. Now I don't even know where I can't even get access to my email, my Twitter, my whatever, my peer to peer messaging app, my game apps, my banking, my crypto, anything. Because when you lose your keys, it's fundamental and people don't want to risk that right now. So things like that are part of what we're working on and that we know requires both the peer to peer tech and sort of the bridging into the centralized systems to get this done. And so that's a lot what we're trying to do with the business side of these things.

31:55

Jason

Because I think one of the biggest problems in sort of blockchain Web3 is just like DeFi applications, for example, are just so complicated for the average person to use. And even if one figures out how to use it's so difficult to figure out, even when some of these are audited DeFi applications, whether they are indeed, because almost every DeFi protocol that's at some point in time or the other had quite significant concerns from hackers. So I'm curious, when it comes to infrastructure projects building on Holochain, with the exception of Holo, which I believe which is sort of blessed by Holochain itself, right? With the exception of that, how do you guys sort of motivate developers to build on Holochain? And when you all launch, do they launch on launchpads? You all have launchpads you guys are partnered with? I'm just curious about that part as well.

32:55

Mary

Yeah, we've just been kicking mean. So Holochain just got to beta this year. We just reached our Beta One release in January or February of this year. And so we really kicked up the work to bring awareness to the developer communities. Obviously we had an active development community that's been working with us during Alpha, but really there's not a whole lot of big incentivized systems, but what we've been doing is building the sorts of tooling that developers expect and want to use. So for. Example, we have a Scaffolding tool that has a developer be able to build an application very quickly, very easily. If developers are familiar with Ruby on Rails, there was a time that Ruby just became the development, yeah, the development language that people wanted to teach in. And it's because they built developer tools that had people be able to get an application built so quickly, so easily.

34:00

Mary

It was rapid application development. And that's the sort of thing that we're building. And so we have one already. So when you go to developer holochain.org as a developer to get started, you can find that there and you can use it just right on the command line and you just answer questions and then suddenly you have an app working. And when you have the app working, you also have this playground. You can actually visualize and see what's happening in your application. It does the work to have people go, oh, okay, I get it immediately out of the gate. I can have an application where I can make a change in one and see it in the other with two different agents working immediately. And that's pretty profound. When it comes to building more complex apps, they're getting a lot of help from our development teams and our larger community of developers.

34:55

Mary

We have a developer education program that we've been running, which is an Immersive program. We have a lot of community activities and hackathons, which are we call them hackathons, but I'll be really blunt, they're not the kinds of things that people are used to seeing at a hackathon. Our hackathons are these amazing community gatherings and education spaces where people get inspired, start collaborating, meeting new people, building out their apps, learning how to architect. They're just fabulous weekend events. And even in the last couple of months, we started doing these DApp in a day sort of workshop sessions to help get people started as well. And now we're moving all of those online. So really it's an effort that is about awareness to developers because there's so much interest. Holochain is built on rust. It works with Wasm, it works with JavaScript frameworks, front end frameworks.

35:57

Mary

You're building applications similar to the kinds of applications that you want to build, whether it's to play a game, whether it's to do a collaboration tool, whether it's to support your local community club soccer team to do something. These are the applications that open source developers like to build anyway. And so when they find us, they're like, oh cool, here's a community of people that are fantastic to work with, have developer tools, and are working in technologies that are familiar. And so it really is, I think we're like an automatic sort of fit for a lot of people who want to get started in development.

36:38

Jason

So it sounds like you're saying, in contrast to companies like, let's say Polygon and Near Protocol, that essentially just use a very large grant program and then the direction of those grants to inspire people to develop on their network. Your focus is more like essentially just providing a really comprehensive developer framework and easy to understand something that they're familiar with based off of Ruby and being able to develop an application. So essentially providing something that just is more useful as opposed to just giving them a bunch of money and saying, okay, well, it's not as useful perhaps, but make it work because here's a.

37:18

Mary

Bunch of definitely we don't have a grant program out there right now. I mean, we'd love to be able to do some funding for those sorts of things in the future, and we most likely will. But when we did our ICO for Holo, we didn't raise the kinds of funds that would allow for that. We didn't do the thing that Protocol Labs or Polygon did in terms of the levels of the raises that they were doing. And in some ways it's because we are still committed to that broad community sort of activation approach to things. Now, that doesn't mean that we're not contributing to building things, we are supporting it by we are paying into certain groups, labs and development groups to build certain types of things. But if you think of it more like when an app store gets put onto a technology, a phone or a computer of some sort, you have to have a certain level of applications out there that people can see and experience use as a demo to kind of set the expectation of what's possible with a technology.

38:34

Mary

And those are the sorts of things that we're doing. So we have Kanban boards, for example, and we have another app that really works great for developer teams to do their retros at the end. We have email apps and messaging apps that people can try out. A lot of these are in prototype states, some of them are in demo states. And we're really intending to build things out at different levels so there's different opportunities for people to play. One of my favorite apps that we use, we dog food with it, but we also use it as a demo. It's called Acorn and it's really a dependency tree. So you can use it for project management or strategy development, those kinds of things. It's very collaborative, you can kind of move things around real time. This is one of the big differences with Holochain. When people actually use an app, it is automatically something that is functionally, usable and intuitive for them and they sometimes have a harder time distinguishing, like oh wait, really?

39:40

Mary

This is peer to peer, there's no server in the middle. And that's the kind of AHA moment when you realize there's no middleman, there's no company kind of intermediary holding your data. It's fantastic.

39:57

Jason

So it's like direct, no gatekeeping basically.

39:59

Mary

Exactly.

40:02

Jason

So you mentioned earlier sort of being able to get data from multiple different agents and you also sort of touch on very briefly on the concept of Agent centricity. So could you maybe elaborate on that? Is that the same as sort of prioritizing individuals within a blockchain?

40:18

Mary

Yeah, it's really interesting. With Holochain we call it agent centric because all the data provenance starts at the individual and people get to opt in. But the minute you realize that you're opting in, you realize that you're also opting into a peer driven space. And so I don't know that I would call it all just focused on the individual so much as focused on the group because it's really sociocentric. Every application is more focused on the dynamic of groups and what do different groups agree to be doing together? Right. Because one of the things, and I didn't quite use this language earlier, but we like to talk about walking away or forking is how it gets talked about in GitHub or in crypto a lot of times. But the idea that even with groups where you're doing things and collaborating, you always have the option to keep your data and walk away and you could go create a different group.

41:25

Mary

You can take that application, you can take your data and you can go do it different. You can change the rules. Basically, you fork the application by changing the rules. What you do may no longer be valid in the original group, but you may have another group of people that thinks it's completely valid and that you can go and suddenly be, whatever playing a different game with that group of people. This is what we think is important. If you think about it's playground dynamics, right? This is how we as human beings work in the real world.

41:59

Jason

So that's really fascinating. I'm curious in terms of games. So I advise a couple of game projects. So I'm curious, if there's space for gaming projects on Holochain, what sort of value could a game get rather for building on that? And would that be something that they would basically integrate with their current existing blockchain? So also, how does sort of Holochain play nice with other blockchains and interoperable with them and so on?

42:28

Mary

Absolutely. So there's some ways that we have done some prototypes and some demos and we're getting ready to build what we're in development on. Another piece that I can mention briefly here, but it's really easy, I mean, in terms of how we interoperate with blockchain technologies, it's as simple as we use the same cryptography as blockchains do, so we can validate the cryptography on both sides of things. So you can just easily bind your wallet to your Holochain agent. We can do token gating into applications with crypto wallets. You can do all of that sort of stuff. Now, what makes it really interesting is that when you're talking about gaming Holochain right now, I would say is super prepped for what do you call it? Sorry, I just went blank. Turn based games. So there's a way that we have built quite a few different turn based games, go chess, things like that already as demos on Holochain.

43:36

Mary

And that's really it transforms things because you don't need to use Tokens to incentivize the gameplay itself. You can use Tokens in other ways that you may want to incentivize the winnings or certain behaviors, things like that.

43:55

Jason

Specific behavior within the game.

43:59

Mary

Exactly. One of the things we're doing right now, we've got some prototypes out that show basically how to bind in and use it with a Minting NFT type of project. We're working with the Rain Protocol on some things and we're doing a build out right now of a game that we're going to be using as a demo when we go to some conferences. And it's fabulous because it has the whole way to play the game and the way to Mint NFTs and then also sort of the fractal claims and everything at the end of it. So we'll be showcasing that a little bit later this year and it'll be really exciting for really kind of showing off a bunch of different techniques you can use with Holochain alongside Blockchain.

44:48

Jason

Speaking of showcasing, we're coming up toward the end of this really fun conversation for me very soon. I sort of want to go into your thoughts sort of broadly on the market. But before we get there, I was just curious if you had anything that you wanted to sort of point out with regard to what's coming next for Holochain. What are some of your focuses and maybe one of some of your case studies of success?

45:16

Mary

Yeah, these next six months we are just going to be everywhere actually. For one thing, we're going out to a lot of events. We'll be working deeply in some of the Identity Workshop events this fall. We're going to be at a couple of Blockchain Web3 events. We'll be in London at the Zebu live. We're going to be up in the Nordic area. We're all over Europe, especially right now and then we'll be back in the US in October. We also have one of our Immersive trainings starting up. We're still taking applications for that. You can find all of this information on our website on holochain.org. And if you go to the events page, it's just events. You'll find all of the ways to get involved and attend some of these. We haven't announced it but we're also going to be having like two or three hackathons that are happening again in the next three months.

46:11

Mary

So there's just a ton of activity going on. There's a ton of building going on right now and so we'll just keep showcasing things on our video, on our ecosystem sessions and all of that. But we're really focused on getting the word out and being in developer spaces in particular for the next few months.

46:30

Jason

Yes, everybody definitely follow Holo train and the work that they're doing.

46:49

Mary

I think I lost you. Maybe you got muted.

46:51

Jason

Oh, yeah, I was thank you for that. No. So I was very curious about your thoughts on the general market, and we've seen this sort of Jimmy Carter's general malaise creep in to the whole industry. And I'm curious whether you think, are we on the road out of that and how long it will take.

47:17

Mary

I don't know that this is my sweet spot, really, to be doing predictions on. But, you know, it's really interesting because we've been kind of living through this with most of the other projects in this space for the last four or five years, and it's tough when it goes down and the communities lose the energy. But the thing is, it's not just happening in this particular Web3 crypto space. It's really been happening everywhere. And I think it's sort of the financial situation that we're in, it's part of what we're saying. It isn't working to some degree with the financial systems globally and how they don't necessarily really have things work for those people who are either at the bottom or in the middle as well as they do for the people at the top, because this downturn hasn't really affected nearly as much the folks in the higher echelons.

48:15

Mary

And so for me, I'm hopeful. I always have a grain of skepticism, but I'm hopeful that we've turned a corner and then we're going to be seeing things ease up a little bit for people. But I'm even more hopeful because I just keep seeing the levels of innovation that I think along with the commitments and the movements out there for saying things have to change. We actually have to make sure that the world works for everybody and not just for the few. For me, I'm not really good at predicting the markets going up or down, but I am hopeful that as societies and communities, that we're going to keep putting something forward and caring for each other and making it better for more people. That's what I'll leave it with.

49:09

Jason

Understood. So we've had some questions, but a lot of them on the AdLunam Twitter space, but a lot of them have actually been answered by Hesu from Holochain, so I definitely wanted to give him a shout out. Yeah, it's really amazing, I think the amount of interest and sort of genuine organic interest that is around this. By the way, moving back on to kind of what you were saying, I think the people in the higher echelons from a financial perspective in this industry are keeping their powder dry for things to get really bad so they can get deals. And so this is exactly what's happening. Right. So a lot of crypto VCs that were previously investing in early stage companies are now sort of shifting gears and saying, hey, you know what, let's take some OTC deals in companies that already have tokens that have a track record of two, three years.

50:04

Jason

It's at a discount and maybe we won't make as much, it's not as much of a reward, but it's a lot less riskier strategy. And so we're seeing so many of these new projects, these really tiny, just trying to do something, just completely get run over because there's just no funds, very little funds for them. And if it's going to come to them at a massive premium. This is sort of happening industry wide. I hope it changes. I think everybody that has a token that's public is hurting right now. Because by the way, I heard a story recently about this crazy conspiracy theory that the internet is just full of bots and nobody's real. I thought it was funny, but you know what's funny is that I really thought, hey, this actually might be true when it comes to crypto, it actually might be more true because it seems like it's like everybody's disappeared.

51:03

Jason

Like there's nobody in the room. Like all the groups, the telegram groups that are massively active, there's almost no activity in there and it's almost like there's a dead crypto industry meme. So I wonder when it'll come back. I hope it does. But yeah, I think once credit starts being eased up a bit, then you'll have some more money flowing in.

51:27

Mary

Exactly. And I do think that those cycles are moving and shifting. I mean, we're seeing some of the financial change in different places and I believe that will take some time before we see that shift, though it is true. I think for us, in a way, we put our head under the sand a little bit around some of the way that the financial industry is working. Because at the end of the day, we think that the value that gets generated in the work is probably like at least in our case, it's more important to us than the value in the prospecting for it. It's not to say that this stuff doesn't matter and isn't part of the whole cycle. It's just to say that at some point in time, whether you're talking about it in the traditional finance or even in crypto, we've made the world of the investment side of it almost more important than the actual building of value underneath it.

52:33

Mary

For me, it helps us to stay grounded in the building of the real value. I think one of the examples of this I hear this regularly from my own partner is at the time when most companies stopped giving out dividends and told their investors what they needed to be looking for was a value gain. Something just dramatically shifted in the world of finance and it stopped being about what was underlying the value in companies and what was underlying the value in human engineering and human coordination and collaboration. And I'd say that for us, we are concerned with the areas of real value, where food is being created, where energy is being created, where things that provide us the connection, the shelter, all of those things. This is stuff that at the core matters for every human being on the planet. And so I think for this whole world of the crypto space, my biggest hopes is that we can evolve towards the creation of more and more real value.

53:57

Jason

Yeah, I mean, I think that's the optimum approach as well, because one can't really control these macroeconomic factors like Ukraine grain or war in Russia or Ukraine or whatever. But one can sort of focus on just trotting along and building something substantial and then hoping that the price action follows and the market starts to pay attention once it starts picking up, sort of around the world on an industry wide level. Sorry, go ahead.

54:34

Mary

And to add on, I think it's more than hoping, I think it is designing for the right flows and the right mechanisms when we're talking about Holo and Holo fuel and hot converting into Holo fuel. Holo fuel has a design that is intended to tie it to something that creates value that allows value to flow between people who have a need and people who have capacity and that does matter. And those are the sorts of things that if we keep building with the value flows and the movements of goods and services that are meaningful, I think that we'll have value flows that are visible, that are something that people can tap into and be a part of, but that also are meaningful to our lives. And I think that's really a critical design pattern that we're working towards and we think that with Holochain you can build that design pattern more effectively than in a lot of other technologies.

55:36

Jason

I think building for the real world and building real world use cases is sort of the antidote to the criticism that blockchain has no use case. Which by the way, I still hear today that web three is just a fad and it's crazy that people tar crypto with the same brush where let's say GoDaddy has certain utility, it provides as and it hosts regular websites on regular servers and it charges you US dollars. So if you were to transpose that business onto crypto and essentially host, let's say, decentralized websites and then charge by a token, clearly there's a value there that is exactly that has more in common with, let's say GoDaddy's business than, let's say the crypto market at large, right? Because there's some tokens that have no utility. But it's still funny that you don't see these companies correlate with like companies in the web2 world.

56:36

Jason

They correlate with web3 companies in general, which I think is sort of one of the dangers of the market because it means that go ahead.

56:45

Mary

But you see the same thing in the traditional market too when the top 100 go up, then the thousands below them also go up and down. I mean, this is not a surprising thing when you see the industries. I agree that the dynamic that you're talking about between the traditional financial market and the crypto market, you don't see the connections at an industry level as much as you see at the market level related to crypto. But I do think that has something to do with the tokenomics and the design of the systems themselves. And this is one of those things. Right now we're using an ethereum based token as the placeholder for HoloFuel. But when we move into the Holo hosting being an active project, that connection becomes more tenuous because Hot becomes more about the reference to the Holo fuel and the hosting than it does about the reference to the system.

57:48

Mary

That is tradable. Yeah. So then at that point we might be seeing the shift of what you're talking about in terms of relating it more to the other industries.

57:57

Jason

So you mean when it moves from being an asset that's just being traded to an asset that's being used within the system? Within exactly. Actual utility, yeah. Okay, great. So we just have a couple more questions because we're toward the end. So I just sort of wanted to get your overall thoughts on where you see the future of Web Three and crypto going and then also more personally about your personal philosophy, like what keeps you going in this industry. Because I think for us, for entrepreneurs in this space, we're just constantly trying to find our own challenges to motivate us to say, okay, now this is what we will if we get this, then it will prove we're somewhere. And then you almost have to make your own parameters because there's no parameters pre made.

58:44

Mary

Yeah, well, I think it's interesting, I'm a little curious myself where everything will go. Obviously some folks are looking at AI and the connection between how will AI affect this industry. I think machine learning by itself is something that is having massive effects and will continue to have that. But I think that at a distributed level, I think we'll see an even larger opportunity to a degree, but we don't have the systems in place and the mechanisms there yet. So I think that's one area that we might see some growth in the coming years. I think that I'm uncertain about where all of the different types of crypto projects will go in terms of web3, whether you're talking about metaverse type projects, whether you're talking about some of the NFT projects. I think NFTs are like the ups and downs of the market has actually created a really interesting opportunity for NFTs just to really be grounded in specific use cases, as you've been saying.

59:48

Mary

Those things that find a usability. Well of course with non fungible tokens there is fundamental usability and I think those are starting to really come to the fray and they may not have as much drama or hype as some of the early stuff did, but I think those will really evolve. And I'm excited to be connected to some of the folks who are building that, whether it is in the space of museum and archiving and other things like that, or in collectibles or also in the space of like well, what are real assets that need a different form, a digital form of representation. So I think that's happening and that's happening kind of under the hood in a lot of ways without a lot of drama and I think that's really great in the other spaces. For me personally, I'm just ready for the Usability shift in peer to happen and I think that part of what I'm up to.

Mary

Part of what I'm interested in is this being a contributor to the transition here that is the ultimate need for adoption around things being more distributed, things not being dependent on intermediaries. And don't get me wrong, I think there's a place for some centralized services and I think there's a place for completely distributed things. I want a society that functions and I think what's happened is that we've only had the option for everything to have intermediaries and decision makers in the middle for us. And so I'm wanting to really be at cause in shifting the potential for a society that is designed and operating just a little bit differently with a little more agency and a little bit smaller group mutuality and trust. And it's interesting because I'll say this, one of the things that never really caught my imagination around crypto was this idea of trustlessness.

Mary

And I understand it at the technical level of what's being said, but for me, I'm far more interested in building communities of trust, not building circles of trustlessness, if that makes sense, because that's what's going to give a life that is worth living for me. So anyway, that's a little bit around my purpose and future and what I.

Jason

Imagine well, I think it also helps build community, right? Because trust is sort of central to any community. And actually I wish I had got into NFTs before you mentioned it just now and we didn't get a chance to talk about it all. My co-founder Nadja has a show, hosts the Future NFTs podcast for AdLunam as well. And we have talked to so many projects that have really real world use cases of NFTs and I think almost that's where some of the biggest innovation is. It's surprisingly you wouldn't think that because so much of NFTs have been focused on the design based NFTs and these hype cycle based communities like Crypto Apes and stuff. And then only now the more utility focused NFTs exactly got in some interest. But since we're at the end of this, I'm curious, do you have any closing thoughts to share?

Jason

And we'll say some final words then.

Mary

Perhaps well, honestly, I like ending with community. We started a little bit and then we started tech and moved it right into community. I just want to say that this world, the work that we do, like we said, some of the biggest challenges have been with generating and working with a community while we're still in development. And yet some of the greatest benefits that we have are the amazing people that are out there that we just keep getting to interact with on a daily and weekly basis. So I just want to say thank you to everybody that's been out there working on this, supporting us and seeing the possibility and making it come alive and be real, for sure.

Jason

I definitely think, like I mentioned earlier.

Mary

I think we lost you or you’re on your mute.

Jason

Yes, I was on mute. What I was saying is I appreciate that. Yeah, I said when you think about Holochain, pretty much the first thing I think about is community. So I'm glad we're ending on that note. So definitely give a shout out to the Holochain community. If you're not part of the Holochain community, definitely follow Holochain. The work that they're doing, I really think it's going to be revolutionary. Also follow us speaker please, Mary Camacho. By the way, it's been amazing having you on. It's been extremely enlightening. I love learning more about Holochain. Thank you everybody for tuning in. We'll do this again in a couple of weeks with Diving Into Crypto. Thank you so much everybody. Have a great day. Thank you.

Mary

Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.