Holochain opens direct signaling to app clients, while Requests and Offers reduces validation work and Holochain narrows recent activity scans.
Holochain, a framework for peer-to-peer applications, merged changes on 6 October that let app clients grant permission for direct signals and Rust clients create grants and send them. Signals can notify another agent on a DHT, reducing the need for clients to poll a zome function; applications without coordinator zomes can receive them.
Requests and Offers, a hAppenings.community project to facilitate exchange between Holochain creators, developers, advocates, projects and organisations, merged a validation change on 7 October that speeds profile creation and commits.
Requests and Offers shortens board commits without changing its checks
@AlchemicalSpiralizer merged a change that skips unnecessary work on agent-activity operations and removes duplicate processing, without changing validation rules. The author's one-run probe measured profile creation 77% faster and an average service-type commit 69% faster after the change. The author reports that the end-to-end suite passed 60 tests after the change.
The integrity code change alters the board's DNA hash, and peers on either side of the change cannot see each other.
Holochain lets app clients grant permission for direct signals
@veeso's merged change lets app clients grant permission to cells in their app, gives administrators a grant for any installed cell, and lets Rust clients create grants and send direct signals. Applications without coordinator zomes can receive them too. Remote signals are send-and-forget and open peer connections, so Holochain's guidance is to use them sparingly.
For app teams, the migration requires both peers to upgrade to the changed signal format. Direct signals also require an explicit grant, and grants already stored on a source chain must be issued again.
Holochain limits recent activity checks to the requested range
Holochain is a framework for peer-to-peer applications; on 8 October, @zippy merged a change that limits recent activity requests to the number of actions asked for. It adds indexes so the activity query can use sequence limits, rather than reading the full chain and scanning the whole DHT store while returning only a few actions. The lookup can check whether a contiguous part of another agent's source chain is valid.
In a benchmark on a peer store with a 2,000-action chain and 6,000 stored operations, the median call for a two-action lookup fell from 15 milliseconds to 0.3 milliseconds with both changes. The new indexes take disk space; the author measured about 270 bytes per operation in a store with nearly one operation per action, and about 110 to 150 bytes where each action has 3 to 4 operations. Existing stores build the indexes the next time they open.
JavaScript client adds direct signals and publishes a release
The JavaScript client for the Holochain conductor API merged @veeso's direct-signal support on 7 October. It can send signals to agents, create grants for an app's cells or any installed cell through the admin connection, and deliver incoming signals to listeners with the receiving cell, sender and payload. This gives JavaScript apps a send and receive path for direct signals.
The client published v0.22.0 on 7 October. Alongside direct signals, the release regenerates its wire types from Holochain's Rust source and aligns operation types with Holochain 0.7 serialization. Code that handles every signal type or implements the client interface must account for the new signal variant and methods; request and response names also change to match the generated types.
Volla Messages moves its desktop build to Holochain 0.7
Volla Messages is private chat for Android and desktop. @zippy merged #206 to update the bundled desktop build to Holochain 0.7 and route the app's API through direct desktop communication instead of a loopback WebSocket. The author reports that the desktop conductor boots, installs the app and opens its window in a smoke test, while all 10 integration tests passed against 0.7 conductors.
The change covers the bundled desktop build; the Android service build remains a separate step, and data from version 1.x does not carry over.
Holochain, its integrity SDK, and AD4M merge changes
Holochain merged #6008 to add direct signals through its conductor APIs, #6011 to check received entry data against its claimed identifier before storing it, #6022 to backport safer hash decoding, and #6024 to stabilize a flaky test. The integrity SDK project holochain-hdi merged #29 to return errors, rather than panic or over-allocate, when decoding malformed hashes or signatures.
AD4M, a social-network and interoperability framework, merged #1230 to queue overlapping Rust-language calls and make a smart-literal test independent of result order, #1227 to break ties in paged model queries by instance, and #1240 to return decoded overlay types. The migration-service project merged #33, separating its TestNet and MainNet update routers so each follows releases for its own network.
Flowsta Vault and Presence publish app releases
In the 7 days to 9 October 2026, the ecosystem recorded 816 commits and 13 releases; the 30-day release count was 68. In the 90 days to 9 October, 51 people contributed. In the 30 days to 9 October, 102 code bases were active. During 2–8 October, people merged 60 pull requests, separately from 37 automated updates. These figures were counted on 9 October 2026.
In the 7 days to 9 October, commits per day ranged from 16 on 3 October to 136 on 6 October, with 105 on 8 October.
Chart data
| commits | |
|---|---|
| Fri 2 | 29 |
| Sat 3 | 16 |
| Sun 4 | 47 |
| Mon 5 | 63 |
| Tue 6 | 136 |
| Wed 7 | 63 |
| Thu 8 | 105 |
For builders adopting direct signals or the Requests and Offers optimization, coordination is part of the change: signal peers need matching wire formats and fresh grants, while connected board peers need compatible DNA versions.