ProofPoll and Flowsta Vault are here — and so is the fastest way to build a Holochain app

Two new desktop apps, free and open source on Linux, Mac and Windows. Flowsta Vault puts your identity entirely in your own hands. ProofPoll is the first Holochain app built on top of it — a real, working voting app where one vote means one real person, and a complete template you can fork into an app of your own.

Today we're releasing two desktop apps — and an open invitation to build the next one.

Flowsta Vault puts your identity entirely in your own hands: your keys, your recovery phrase, on your machine, where we can never see them. ProofPoll is the first Holochain app built on top of it — a real, working voting app where every vote is one real person, and a complete template you can fork into an app of your own.

Both are free, open source under the MIT license, and available now for Linux, macOS (Intel and Apple Silicon) and Windows.

Flowsta Vault: your identity, on your machine

Flowsta Vault is a desktop identity manager that runs a local Holochain conductor as a sidecar. It's the piece that makes everything else possible.

Your identity begins with a recovery phrase. From that phrase Vault derives your cryptographic keys — so the same phrase always brings your identity back, on any device — and we never see either the phrase or the keys. They live only on your machine, encrypted at rest with Argon2id and AES-256-GCM and unlocked only by your password. This isn't "we promise not to look" — there's no copy on our servers to look at. Vault runs offline, locks itself after inactivity, and sits quietly in your system tray.

What makes it more than a key store is the handshake it offers other apps. When a desktop Holochain app wants to act as you, it asks Vault — and you approve, in a dialog you control. Behind that approval, Vault writes a Holochain agent link: a cryptographic attestation, published to the identity network, that the app's Holochain agent and your Flowsta identity are the same person. That's how Sign It signs documents from the desktop, and how ProofPoll knows that one human is one voter. Vault only needs to be open for that first link — afterwards the app runs on its own.

And simply by running, your Vault makes the whole network stronger. It's a real Holochain node, not just a client: it holds and gossips data with its peers, so the Flowsta network grows more resilient with every person who runs one. Your machine isn't just using the network — it's part of it.

Your data stays with you, too. Vault keeps your identity, your Sign It signatures, and an encrypted backup of every app you connect — all on your machine, all yours to read and no one else's. Those app backups are a safety net: if a connected app ever loses or has its local data deleted, it pulls its backup straight back out of Vault and carries on where it left off. And whenever you want to walk away, Vault exports everything — identity, keys, and all your app data — as a single portable file built to be complete under the Cryptographic Autonomy License (§4.2.1). You're never locked in — not to us, and not to any app built on top of us.

Read more and download Flowsta Vault → · Source on GitHub

ProofPoll: verified polls, no central control

ProofPoll is exactly what it sounds like — polls and votes — but with two things no centralised poll can offer.

One vote, one real person. Online polls are trivially gamed; ProofPoll isn't. Because voters link their Flowsta identity, the app can resolve every vote down to a single verified human, even across multiple devices, and quietly drop the duplicates. No emails to harvest, no accounts to farm — just sybil-resistant results.

No one can quietly edit it or rewrite the count. Polls and votes live on a peer-to-peer distributed hash table, replicated and validated across every participant. We run an always-on node so the data stays available even when other peers are offline — but that node holds no authority over it: there's no admin who can change a result, and no single copy whose removal would take the data with it. Polls can be community-flagged as spam or misleading, yet nothing is ever deleted — flagging is an opinion layer, and the record stays on the network.

It even does something most people think is impossible: private data on a public network. Add a private rationale to your vote, or draft polls before publishing them, and ProofPoll encrypts them client-side before they ever touch the DHT. Peers replicate the ciphertext for resilience but can't read a byte of it — only you can.

ProofPoll on GitHub · Download the latest release

The part we're most excited about: fork it

ProofPoll is a working app you can use today. But it was built, from the first commit, to be forked into something else entirely — a review platform, a task tracker, a proposal system, a social feed. The voting specifics are easy to swap out; the hard parts are done.

And the hard parts of a desktop Holochain app are genuinely hard. Managing a conductor's lifecycle. Recovering cells that silently disable themselves after an idle night. Migrating data between DNA versions with no central server to coordinate it. Encrypting private data on a public DHT. Linking a sovereign identity. Running an always-on node so data survives when everyone's offline. We've spent the last eight months building with Holochain nearly every day, and every one of those problems is solved, commented, and documented inside ProofPoll.

Forking it, alongside the Flowsta Developer Docs, is the fastest route we know to a working Holochain app with real production know-how baked in — not a toy example.

Here's our honest recommendation: if you've been meaning to build a Holochain app, don't start from a blank page. Clone ProofPoll, open it with Claude Code (or your AI coding tool of choice), point it at the repo and the docs, and tell it what you want to build. The forking guide, the inline comments, and the developer docs were written to be read by humans and AI agents. We've watched a working app come together this way in an afternoon.

Why build it this way at all

It would be far easier to run polls on a central server we own. We didn't, for the same reason Sign It doesn't keep your signatures in a database: agent-centric, user-owned software changes who's actually in charge.

There's no per-transaction gas bill, because Holochain isn't a blockchain — each person has their own chain, so we can offer real apps for free. We do run an always-on node to keep ProofPoll's data reliably available, but running a node buys us no power over it: every entry is replicated and validated by all peers, on chains we don't control — so we can't rewrite a count, censor a poll, or quietly delete one. The data isn't ours to take; it would outlive us on the network, in the hands of the people who use it. That's not a marketing promise — it's how the technology works.

ProofPoll is the proof of it: a complete, useful app, owned by its users, that anyone can pick up and make their own.

Get started

If you've ever wanted to build something on Holochain, this is the shortest path we can give you. Go fork it.

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