What are holons and what can they do for YOU?

Put very simply, Holons are a new architecture that’s going to blow mass interoperability open in web3 - paving the way to an open metaverse during this bull run.

Hi all. It's been a VERY busy few months in OASIS world, with a ton of work going on behind the scenes which we're excited to bring out. One big focus has been on STAR, which is using holonic architecture to do some very cool things - this post is an explanation of what holons are and what they can do for your project.

Introduction to Holons

A holon is a part of a system that is also a system in itself, and can be considered a subsystem within a larger system. The term is a combination of the Greek words holos, meaning "whole", and -on, meaning "part". In holonic architecture, app data is stored in ‘holons’ - groupings of data which are able to operate as a standalone group, and interoperate inside the whole. A simple system, with the capability of scaling to become highly complex.

A holonic app functions as a standalone app - but it also shares data with the holon it is part of - which could be a company, a swarm of other apps, a database, a series of games, a DePIN network - and so on.

Creating Holonic Apps

Converting an app to holons manually would be an incredibly inefficient task. What makes it possible is STAR. STAR stands for Synergizer Transformer Aggregator Resolver, and we believe that it’s a true breakthrough in web3 metaverse technology.

STAR automates the process of converting an app to a holonic app, through the use of COSMIC - our powerful object relational mapper. We’ll cover how exactly it works in a followup post - but on a top level - STAR works as a further abstraction layer on top of the abstraction layer created by OASIS.

A view of how data moves through OASIS ecosystem using COSMIC ORM.

Once your app becomes holonic, it can interoperate with any other holon it wants. In the same way as all your apple devices are always in sync - an app can receive real-time data updates from other apps in its shared holon. The possibilities of this are basically endless.

Gaming / Metaverse

For gaming - game state data syncs between multiple games. Allowing one player to complete a mission where level one is played in game A, and level two is played in game B - with game B picking up where game A left off, and so on.

Startups / Metaverse

For startups - your app can connect with ANY other app that’s also on STAR - creating swarms which integrate with one another in the same way as Apple products do - except it’s with any app or product.

Celestial Bodies / Gamified Growth

Holonic apps grow uniformly, because they are all comprised of just holons. This means that we are able to show them in a very novel way - as Celestial Bodies inside of a cyberspace view.

All holonic apps will start as moons (level 1) and as they grow in users and data, they will grow in stature to become planets and stars. This provides a totally new way to gamify growth.

mockup of celestial bodies

Mix and match holonic components

Holonic apps are completely interoperable, down to their individual components. This makes sharing them very easy. We will be creating STAR NET, a holonic app store with drag and drop capability, massively reducing the barrier of entry to creating cross-chain dApps for non developers.

Connect to web2 and web3

STAR is blockchain agnostic - it works with any chain already integrated into The OASIS - currently that’s Solana, Radix, Arbitrum, Rootstock, Polygon - and acts as a mycelial layer, connecting projects that would otherwise be siloed. In addition to web3, it’s also web2 compatible, meaning it also works with Neo4js, Azure, MongoDB, SQLite - acting as an ‘on-ramp’ to web3 functionality for legacy infrastructure. This is important as so much of our internet is still web2, and it would cost billions to overhaul.

Holons, being at once a whole and a perfect part of something larger, are the perfect encapulsation of the Metaverse idea - where every app is interconnected, and part of a larger, living ‘super-app’.

So yeah. Holons have a very important place in The OASIS ecosystem, and offer your project some pretty amazing new utility, across gaming, metaverse, startups, growth, and more.

Thanks for reading!

Stay tuned as we have a lot of exciting updates coming soon, including: Website launch

White paper launch

Token launch announcement

And more!