The purpose of HOT token is to be used in exchange for other cryptocurrencies or fiat currencies like USD. To make it happen there will be special exchanges that will deal with it and/or integrated directly into user interfaces for any kind of website (just like we see with bitcoin nowadays).
In order to be listed on exchanges HOT token needs to go "public crowd sale", so everyone can buy it. It also needs some market making in order to show liquidity for hot token itself and support price movements, so the public participation is needed here too.
After Hot goes public on Stellar network, their team can build its own decentralised exchange with atomic swaps where many currencies will be able to exchange without any central authority or third party risk (like MtGox). That's an interesting idea, isn't it? This will make HOT a safe and convenient token for regular use.
The name is inspired by "Holo" in holo-feudalistic economy which you can find in the novel "Snow Crash", written by Neal Stephenson, one of my favourite authors.
There are also some other inspirations related to cryptocurrencies like Litecoin's "digital silver" and Bitcoin's "digital gold".
Well, we could simply call it HoloToken.But we think that hot-sauce is more fun than cold sauce. We think this coin will be as popular as the chili pepper itself. If you don't believe us watch some videos on YouTube about chili pepper facts and you will see.
We are open sourcers and would love use crypto tokens that work in real life situations in real companies around the world. We've already tested Bitcoin in our services and we know it doesn't work. So, if a cryptocurrency is built on top of stellar, that would mean it can actually be used "in production".
We love open source community efforts to make the world better place. Stellar is doing great job with code quality and helping other projects on its platform (See Mobius ICO for example). It gives us trust in the people behind HOLO token.
If HOT succeeds on Stellar, Holochain will benefit too because any financial transactions done in cryptocurrencies will increase usage of the whole network . That's also an important reason why we are backing up Holofuel so much - because any financial transactions done in cryptocurrencies helps to spread Holochain faster.
It's no guarantee that Holochain will succeed, but if it succeeds enough it can create a positive feedback loop. We've been working hard to make the developer experience great and we know we still have a lot to do, but we're making progress every day and we'll keep at it until we build something amazing.
