The cheapest way to make a virtual world feel fake is amnesia. If a visitor walks the terrain, discovers a dozen parcels, closes the tab, and returns to a blank slate, the world just told them their time meant nothing.
Holovate persists in two layers. The first is local: your position, discovered parcels, preview balance, and selections are saved to the browser's own storage as you play. No account, no sign-up wall — the world simply remembers you were here.
The second layer is the ledger. When you connect a wallet while the coin service is online, balances, purchases, and daily claims settle on a hash-chained backend ledger with a public audit endpoint. Local mode and live mode share the same interface, and the HUD tells you plainly which one you are in.
Designing the seam between the two layers is the real work. Ledger writes are idempotent so retries cannot double-spend; local actions are previews that reconcile when connectivity returns; and the reset button genuinely resets, because a world you cannot leave cleanly is a trap, not a place.
The persistence model is documented end to end in the Holovate docs.