Dear Community,

There have been a lot of questions recently about what the verification requirements will be for Holo fuel. Many lump all of this together as KYC or “Know Your Customer.” These requirements were first established in the 1990s and have since been adopted and refined around the world by various states, banking and regulatory groups to prevent money laundering, financing terrorism, and general theft.

Personal security

Community Security

For Holo, we are creating and facilitating a community of hosts and app developers using Holochain who will be working together as a distributed cloud platform. As a company, Holo will be a regulated Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) entity. We are currently going through a process in Gibraltar, where we are incorporated, which may impose certain customer verification requirements upon us. We are also addressing the issue of verification from an agent perspective for the network. We are looking at this as peer verification or community security, meaning we are considering, designing for, and building the sort of verifications that you, as a peer on the network, might want to have regarding your peers.

Our Approach to the Design

Each dApp built on Holochain determines if it has any identity verification requirements and how to approach them. Holochain also provides a personal data vault application enabling users to host and serve their own personal information.

p2p dApp

Holo fuel is not a built-in currency for Holochain; it is a currency dApp that is part of the Holo platform and at the heart of our strategy to make P2P dApps accessible to the mainstream.

Holo will have and store data related to our contractual relationship with Hosts and App Publishers. For general identity validation, Holo will certify third-party ‘KYC’ validators who will each store the records of the parties they validate, and who will agree to release identity information to Holo upon evidence of any criminal behavior.

Some verifications may be required, while others will be optional or voluntary. This is because we are designing for both our required contractual relationships and the Community Security context as described above.

Here are a few specific things we can say now:

We expect to have various levels of verification on the Holo network, the use of which will depend on the types of agents/nodes’ interactions/transactions. Higher levels of verification will be required for Hosts and App publishers compared to those who, for example, may just be customers using Holo fuel for an in-app purchase transaction. Some verifications will be conducted by one or more 3rd party providers, while others such as an email verification, we may do ourselves. We plan to have a badges and points system where the certified 3rd party providers can sign for the badges or grant points for specific data that is verified (i.e. name, location, address, banking, etc.).

For example, an app publisher would get more points for validating a passport than they would for validating their email. Badges will show that the app provider has validated their name and location, similarly to verified YouTube channels or Facebook accounts. If you buy a HoloPort, you will be able to see these points and badges and decide if you want to allow this app provider to host on your device(s). Similarly, app providers may be able to choose you as a host according to the data you are willing to share, as well as the capacities of your HoloPort and your reputation of up-time.

We will publish details about the HOT to Holo fuel swap next week. And then, as we complete the process for our DLT license in Gibraltar, we’ll share even more, including what will be required versus voluntary.

We appreciate all your questions and feedback on these important topics. Thank you for your support, content, and each way you contribute toward helping us realize this vision. Keep up the great community work!

— Holo Executive Director, Mary Camacho