HoloFuel the Currency, and HoloFuel the Transactor Front-end App
HoloFuel is the micro-currency powering the Holo network. It's a holochain-based currency design that constitutes a contractual service obligation redeemable for hosting. Designed as a mutual-credit accounting system, it has an offsetting debit for every credit such that everything always balances out to a net total of zero. Neither the supply nor the market price are fixed, rather the supply is dynamically managed through mechanisms like credit limits (set according to other user and system metrics) and must be kept to be neither too scarce nor excessively plentiful so that there's an expanding and contracting effect (thus, "breathing currency").
The HOT ERC20 tokens issued in the Holo ICO are to be converted to HoloFuel at a rate of 1:1 upon launching in the next two months or so. HoloFuel is said to be "value-stable" which is not the same as "price-stable", but means that 1 unit of HoloFuel will always correspond to/buy that much hosting services available on the network. There will also be reserve accounts in place, each for the issuing/retiring of specific currency pair (e.g., Fuel/Hot, Fuel/Ether, Fuel/USD) and whose main purpose is to ensure hosts are able to cash out to fiat or other crypto as needed to pay bills and cover operating expenses. Each reserve will create and maintain an order book issuing a certain amount of Fuel at each price point.
The economics of HoloFuel are explained in much depth and detail here and constitute a great case in point and an example of what holochain, as a currency design framework, is all about (and what currency design in the sense of "current-sees" really means in practice). Holo and the Holo network is a way of bootstrapping holochain and bringing it to the world and as such it starts off with providing holochain application (happ) hosting services in a distributed fashion, with hosting providers, app developers and users altogether interacting to bring about what is really a different culture in how we handle these things. Can think of it as the AWS (Amazon Web Services) for distributed peer-to-peer holochain applications.
As a hosting service provider for happs, Holo is launching with a few initial basic happs such as key and personal data management, web bridging, a simple chat, etc. HoloFuel is both the micro-currency that powers the Holo hosting network and the app for sending and receiving it. Holo hosts earn HoloFuel by hosting on the network and the HoloFuel app is how payments are received. In the background of the HoloFuel UI however it is the HoloFuel transactor that operates.
The app allows you to receive offers and requests in the inbox (and accept, reject or pay them), to yourself create offers for sending someone HoloFuel or request that somebody send you. And, of course, a history of your activity and transactions. For a transaction to take place, both sender and receiver need to sign it in order to confirm it (in accordance with holochain's agent-centric model). The whole thing is designed to be as intuitive and easy to use as possible, although some of the design specifics and the reasoning that has gone into it may require a little more attention to process and connect the dots. The HoloFuel model specification is available at the Github repository here.
