On June 5, Holo—a distributed cloud computing platform built on Holochain—announced a new strategic partnership with a project called Promether. After several months of discussions between the two parties, a mutual interest in each other’s platforms from a development perspective was born.
While most crypto enthusiasts are aware of Holo and Holochain after their recent $23 million ICO raise and a very rapidly growing community, Promether might be a little more unknown to the larger crypto community.
What is Promether?
According to the announcement, Promether is an Adaptive Symbiotic Platform (ASP) that implements all the networking, security, and anonymization code that applications need to protect their data. It claims to place full control in the hands of the users by merging decentralized networks, state-of-the-art encryption, and distributed ledger technology.
While this is a very basic overview description, diving into their whitepaper reveals a lot more interesting information. What Promether is basically attempting to do is create a new scalable decentralized network with complete security features for the people using it.
Broadly speaking, Promether is a symbiotic relationship between 3 layers—the network, applications, and users. Applications inherit privacy, anonymity, and security features from the network, and then pass those benefits on to the users. They state that by creating layers of security, anonymity, and privacy on top of a decentralized incentivized system, Promether can redefine how people engage online, while solving the problems associated with the centralization of control.
This is important because there are various concerns about the privacy issues when it comes to blockchains, as leaders in the space tend to agree that having everyone’s records and transactions revealed in a way that could be traced back to the individual merely changes the shape and form of already existing surveillance by governments and corporations. It is also important because it’s arguably not enough to have privacy for transactions only (privacy coins), because we also need solutions where privacy is built into our daily activities online, such as storage, sharing, messaging, browsing, etc.
Therefore, it is a very interesting goal that Promether has set up to achieve—to provide alternative solutions to the traditional centralized, surveillance-driven networking model, as well as to combat the scalability and privacy issues that most blockchains and decentralized networks face. Due to a variety of problems with current centralized and decentralized systems, providing more security, privacy, modularity, and scalability is definitely required, which makes them an interesting project to keep an eye on.
Where Does Holo Fit Into This?
There is still much information to be revealed by the projects during the coming months, but the nature of the partnership is collaboration in terms of security and development.
Titled “Strategic Security Partnership,” it appears that both are looking to utilize each other’s platforms in regards to certain aspects of their own projects. Currently, the partnership includes Promether providing Holo exclusive access to alpha/beta testing of the secure communication app Contact—the first application powered by Promether.
Holochain, on the other hand, will provide an adaptable platform for P2P apps within Promether’s secure endpoints. Time will tell how this partnership will play out and expand, but it is certainly interesting why Holo decided to choose Promether for a partnership of that nature. But there are some clues in the announcement, so we decided to dive into it a little more…
While Promether is a new project trying to kick-start themselves through current private sale and an upcoming ICO, the founder and CEO, Eric J Anderson (Eijah), is everything but new to the world of decentralized systems and networking security.
Most people know about the massive games like GTA5 and Guitar Hero. What they probably don’t know is that Eijah was the lead programmer for both of those during his employment for Activision and Rockstar Games. He is also a DEF CON speaker, CTO of MGT, a college professor, and a security portfolio architect for American Express.
But his fascinating background doesn’t stop there.
When diving a little deeper, Eijah is apparently an infamous hacker who was part of the initial Bluray hack (listen to his interview here), and has also held multiple hacker workshops at some of the most popular hacker conventions like DEF CON. The team he has employed is also very impressive, comprised of leaders in a variety of technical fields such as hacking, programming, network administration, and cybersecurity.
All of this might give us a clue as to why Holo was interested in partnering with such a new upcoming project before they even had any spotlight. What Promether has set out to do, as well as the capabilities of the team, might prove to achieve a lot of great things for the betterment of the blockchain space, especially when they are able to deliver on their promises of privacy, anonymity, and security for blockchains and decentralized networks.
Because of the founder’s extensive background, Holo and Holochain also acquired Eijah to advise the project strategically on their security concerns, which gives another clue as to why Promether was such a desired candidate (and the chosen one) for this partnership.
As already mentioned, the coming months will probably reveal more about the nature and extent of this partnership as more information will be announced, but meanwhile those projects, and especially their cooperation, might be worth keeping an eye on.
You can learn more about Promether on their website. Connect with their community on Telegram or follow them on Twitter. Information on Holo is available on their website, and you can keep up with them on Telegram and Twitter as well.
