My top project for 2018 is Holo.

DISCLAIMER: The following is a project review and should never be taken as financial advice. The following information is my opinion and you should always consult your financial advisors before investing.

How do you know I isn't vapourware or that this isn't just a cash grab?

By doing research. The team ran an ethical ICO. You can watch the video on front page of their website for starters. 75% of the coins were distributed in the crowdsale, and 25% to the team. No lock period for the team's tokens. Wait, no lock-up?! Yes. And they defend it very strongly here.

They have no incentive to dump the tokens, short of starving. In fact, they are incentivized to do their best work and HODL.

Furthermore, their work speaks for itself. Their github has been praised by Andre Cronje, who is a well respected, if sometimes controversial, crypto code reviewer. Their github is insane. They have a solid MVP, serious dapp examples, like a decentralized twitter with a smooth UI. Seriously, if you like good code, check that out, and let me know what you think!

OK, but what makes this project different from X coin that has good code and ethical ICO or a solid team?

Several things. First, their platform, HOLO, is being built with DHT (Distributed Hash Table). It's not a blockchain. For the many reasons, blockchains have struggled thus far with scalability. Arguably, blockchains scale fairly linearly thus far. DHT doesn't. I will admit, I have alot of learning to do about this new tech, but the reading I've done so far is very exciting. Andre, in his code review, describes it as follows: "This is something entirely new, and it isn’t a blockchain, this is a new kind of decentralized beast, but I love it."

The project is currently being shilled all over social media (lots in cryptotwitter) because the ICO is over and it's now profitable to discuss it as an early adopter of the coin.

How come I didn't hear about such an amazing project till after ICO?

A great question. Maybe you should ask those 'trusted' ICO reviewers or pool groups you might follow closely. (Warning: Incoming conspiracy theory)

Firstly, the ICO ran for approximately one month and was on almost no ICO reviewer's spreadsheets. It was on Sergio's, but I believe he overlooked them simply due to the uncapped issue. It seems to me he really got hung up on that. Regardless, the project raised 30K ETH, which is a pittance when you look at the scale of what the dev team is building. Beyond that, I believe the ICO went unnoticed by the majority of the larger cryptocommunity and ICO crowd, because there was zero bonuses, zero backroom deals, zero pooling or commissions, and NO big-name advisors were hired with a promise of a massive % of supply as seems to be the standard (Look at the commissions some of the top ICO advisors take. It is an absurd cash grab and an insult to intelligence of the larger cryptocommunity).

There was nothing to be gained by crypto syndicates, ICO advisors, crypto thought influencers, ICO reviewers, or others who do their own due diligence in researching upcoming projects in spreading awareness of this project before the ICO closed. Instead, they were incentivized to NOT mention this amazing project because the softcap was miniscule and there are so many bullish, great factors about this project I have yet to dive into (please read on). It's my theory that they wanted to keep the hardcap small, so that their potential ROI as ICO investors is much larger. This speaks largely to advocate two things to keep in mind if you stay in crypto: DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH and QUESTION EVERYONE'S INTENTIONS when they are shilling a project. That includes me talking about this project. I encourage you after reading this to dive in and do your own research and be critical of my thoughts on it. Don't FOMO in blindly, please. Make an informed decision to invest or not or to keep your eye on it.

Well, how come the team didn't do any marketing that I saw?

Ask them yourselves. They are incredibly communicative in their telegram, very friendly, open, transparent, and down-to-earth. They are geeks at heart. They love tech. The founders have been working on this project for years. You can trace it back to an overarching project, called the MetaCurrency Project, which seems to have begun perculating in their minds before Bitcoin existed. Yes, you heard me. This is not a cashgrab by some half-assed dev team. They want to make something amazing, life-changing, world-impacting, and revolutionary. They are making a dev platform like ethereum was arguably meant to be, but broader in scope and much more efficient. Cost efficiency wise, they argue it could be 10,000 times as efficient as Ethereum currently is. The SDK toolkits are in javascript and lisp. Why javascript? Because it is the most common and popular coding language worldwide. They might make others.

Furthermore, if you look at their funding breakdown from ICO funds, you will see 5% towards marketing and communication.

I also have seen some hints of good, productive partnerships in the works, but nothing official, as of yet.

Am I buying a currency that will power the entire platform?

Not necessarily. First of all, the erc20 token is a placeholder or a receipt for holofuel, which will be the currency used for their flagship dapp, Holo, the cloud computing decentralized project. Anyone can come onto their overarching DHT platform once it's launched and run an ICO, or host a project, a dapp, etc. There are limitations and arguably other platforms could be better for other projects (e.g. video hosting might not be the best on this platform), but even then it might be usable for that.

The holofuel currency will fuel the hosting app Holo, which is built on top of the currency neutral Holochain platform. You could use this currency and the ecosystem to run so many different projects. And the scalability and efficiency proposed is pretty awesome. There are many different applications for the Holochain platform as a whole, and Holo is just one of them. One team member explained Holo as the first project on their DHT network (Holochain) as similar to Bitcoin being the first blockchain. You think of Bitcoin as the father to blockchain projects? Think of Holochain like Daddy Hash.

What is the actual value of holofuel? How do I know my token will actually be worth something? People are talking about mutual credit and net zero?

Honestly, you will have to read the currency paper. Link is at bottom of this article. Ask the team. There is a suggestion in the whitepaper that the erc20 tokens may be worth ALOT more than the ICO price when the project is up and running and people are buying holofuel for their projects so they can purchase computing power.

For me personally, I will likely cash my original investment at 10x (maybe.) The Rest I will hold until the mainnet launches. If it gets much too high, I will sell a portion and keep the rest. No one can tell you whether erc20 token cashed for holofuel is worth 10x, 100x, 1000x, etc etc etc upon launch and actual use of the platform. What do I truly believe? That this project will be revolutionary. That it will actually be used. That projects will develop on their platform and people will USE the token. Honestly, in bear markets, I see this coin also as a stable currency, once the project is up and running. Like, I'd rather own this than some extra fiat, or some extra ETH or BTC, in a bear market.

Is this like Hedera Hashgraph?

Yes and no. Each project has it's merits, but they are trying to do different things. And Holochain has a fraction of rumoured initial marketcap that Hedera will. Also, the tokenomics are much friendlier. DYOR on that. Not here to talk about that project, but seems cash grabby to me. Yes, I'm biased. Honestly, I think the Holo team has a more positive opinion on that project. If you want to see comparisons with other projects, click here for the team's draft on those comparisons so far.

Is the current supply the max supply?

Yes and no. Until mainnet launch, it is the max supply. But it's a max supply of receipts for holofuel. You will need to read the currency paper to understand their mutual credit system. Basically, they argue against printing crypto money out of thin air and selling it for money (like other ICOs and projects have done). Holofuel will be asset-backed by cloud computing power. So projects will pay hosts in holofuel to use their holoports and other computers or mining rigs as computational power. I believe their ecosystem will allow for a range of small, medium, and large sized projects to run at a fraction of the cost that corporations are currently charging. This will and has already begun to incentivize developers to operate off their platform. I believe the set up of the ecosystem and DHT will allow for cloud computing decentralization to actually work.

Honestly, read the currency paper. Link below.

Sad that you missed the ICO for this project so feel like you missed the boat?

Honestly, you didn't miss the boat on this project, as a whole. First, you could still invest in the $HOT token. IMO, this project will go 100x before their platform launches.

You can still buy a holoport (a plug and play box, meaning you don't need technical knowledge like you would if you set up your own rig) and participate in the ecosystem and get paid in holofuel by others using the network to leave your holoport running for them to use it's computing power. The flagship dapp of the overall network is decentralized cloud computing power (harddrive space, computation power, bandwidth, internet speeds, etc; potentially uptime, but you shouldn't need a VPS like a masternode) You can get a very efficient holofuel mining machine here.Yes, that's my referral link (Shocker, I know). Honestly, I don't know if when you see this article, whether they will honor my referral link or not since the contest has a deadline. But it costs you nothing extra to use it, so if you're going to buy one, I would ask you do it through my link. If you decide to buy one, but not use my link, I understand. Otherwise, if you appreciated my content and want to thank me, my ETH public address is below!

How efficient is the machine, you ask?

I can't be 100% certain, but the team states it was developed by them specifically for the project and currently being sold at-cost or near to at-cost on the indiegogo site. Price will significantly increase in a couple weeks, when they close the indiegogo site purchases and open up purchases on their main website. The crossed out numbers you see are what the retail price will be.

Can you build your own rig?

The team reports that you absolutely can! The report you will need to be a little bit tech-savvy with Linux, however. If you can build a more efficient machine than the ones you see on their site and figure out the software set-up by yourself, go for it! Keep in mind, your ROI on these machines is tied back to your electricity costs. These machines are tested to run at very low wattage,15-45 kwh. That's incredibly low. The holoport nano will require an external harddrive, using the USB port. Want to offset the power usage of your holoport? Turn off your lights more often.

DON'T THINK OF THESE LIKE ASIC MINERS. Sure, they are specially built for supporting the flagship dapp of their network, upon which I'm betting a significant portion of the applications and projects built on their network will want to use for cheap computing power use (e.g. part of your customer base). However, the dev team reports that you should be able to refigure it to be a linux box, if it eventually becomes inefficient for you to operate as a host. Also, you should be able to modify these machines if you wanted to replace hardware. You just need the know-how. Furthermore, the team has stated they will support their hosts in terms of faulty stock hardware/holoports.

Did anyone big contribute to the ICO?

Honestly, we as community don't know, but we can speculate.

One of the ETH genesis block reward wallets contributed a huge amount of ethereum to this ICO (around 1200-1600). Do some searching of the big contributions; it is traceable back to the ETH genesis and they are a whale who bought $HOT (erc20 token). Some FOMO people are speculating that Vitalik himself donated, but honestly we have no idea. Only the team knows since KYC was completed on those who contributed, like myself (p.s. I found out about project in last 6 hours and spent that time doing research, whitelisting, doing more research, then contributing, in that order....then more research).

There are other mentions by community members of possible other angel investors who contributed to the crowdsale (at same rate as everyone else). There is an unconfirmed potential partnership with Mozilla Foundation, but this is speculation. Mozilla CFO did mention the project, however. I have not looked too much into this. DYOR.

The tokenomics for the ICO are pretty amazing. 75% of tokens sold to community in sale. they raised approx $20 Million USD. They didn't lock up team tokens, but they explain this very well here: https://medium.com/h-o-l-o/why-theres-no-vesting-in-the-holo-ico-feb4f180e8b2

This project has been well under radar. If you want to pick up erc20 tokens that will be exchanged 1:1 for holofuel when mainnet is live, you can do so on IDEX today once tokens unlock.

What's your incentive for talking so bullishly about the project?

I really want this project to succeed. I love new nascent tech, like NANO. I remember the FOMO and excitement before the Bitgrail FUD. Alot of people were alive with excitement about how that project could change crypto. The community was organic and a pleasure to be in. I still love NANO. I want to be a part of that again. I see that here. The difference is I don't see any sketchy exchanges involved. Warning: Team is not in negotiations with any exchanges (are not opposed to be listed, but aren't currently engaged in any talks due to legal concerns around being a security; They want actual use of their crypto) I'm invested as one of the ICO investors. I bought even more at just under 2x ICO. It is the largest part of my portfolio and is very likely to remain that way. I don't see any dumps yet either. Yes, I would really appreciate if you buy a holoport from the referral link below. I don't make much money where I live and it's not like I hold alot of crypto, either. I'm not poor, don't get me wrong, I will likely be working at a regular job for most of my life. Regardless, I will be buying one of the holoport+ as I truly believe in this project. No, I'm not investing more than I'm willing to lose. And don't tell me what to do with my money! I see so many scams in crypto, so much vaporware, so many projects with unfulfilled promises, unethical ICOs, so much PnD, backroom deals, FUD, and speculation. This is a good project and the team is rock solid. I want to share with the cryptocommunity a project that I've become very passionate about.

$ETH Tip Jar: 0x3B5B5040FEEfE830E06Eeb4788DcCf4901cEd493

Holoport Purchase Referral Link (I only get a referral counted if you use this link to complete your purchase. Doesn't count if you bookmark the site and come back 2 weeks later :P, also referral program does close or is possibly closed by time you read this) : https://igg.me/at/h-o-l-o/x/18640955https:/

My Twitter: https://twitter.com/crypto_ShibaInu (if you read this and have no other way to show appreciation, a follow is appreciated. I tweet mostly about crypto)

Holo Telegram: https://t.me/channelholo (Only 3.5K, but at time of ICO close couple days ago it was at 2.5K; if you want to reach out to me there, my telegram handle is: @Elysium_fire)

Holo Chatroom (for technical people and project adopters; team hangs out here, while working away): https://chat.holochain.net/

IDEX market for buying: https://idex.market/eth/hot (tokens selling at above 3x and holding steady at time of writing this article)

Project website: https://holo.host/

Whitepapers (including currency paper, highly recommended): https://holo.host/whitepapers/

Want to develop on their platform? https://developer.holochain.org/

P.S. And yes, I'm buying my own Holoport+ (most expensive model) and I plan to learn javascript and build on the platform :)