Flow is a decentralized blockchain platform with smart contracts functionality built to be a foundation for the new generation of applications, games, and digital assets. It is developer-friendly and aims to attract as many people as possible to the crypto world. It’s a layer-1 blockchain network.
At the core of the idea is the thought that by offering people the things they already know and love (for example, products related to their favorite brands) and providing them with real stakes in the communities they belong to it is possible to attract more audience to digital products. The Flow team also lets consumers become creators in new ways.
The project was founded in 2018 by Dapper Labs. The creators of the Flow blockchain are well-known for delivering great blockchain consumer experiences including CryptoKitties, Dapper Wallet, and NBA Top Shot. The company has also attracted many well-known investors, including Union Square Ventures, Google Ventures, Samsung, Andreessen Horowitz, and the founders of Reddit, Coinbase, and Angelist.
The blockchain runs on Hotstuff — a proven Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism, that adds multi-nodes architecture allowing to achieve fast transaction speed and a bigger throughput. It applies the pipeline structure to the nodes and separates their functions into four different roles: Collection, Consensus, Execution and Verification. The separation is vertical (across the validation stages of every transaction) instead of horizontal (like with sharding). It means that each validator participates in the verification of each transaction but only at one stage of the validation.
The Flow blockchain calls itself the greenest Web3 among leading big companies. It doesn’t use sharding or Layer-2. The transactions on Flow are very cheap and leave just a tiny carbon footprint. Even the creation of NFTs costs much less than on any other platform.
The Flow network offers a set of unique solutions for developers that allows them to create empowering applications and games for users. The blockchain has a multi-role architecture that allows the network to scale to billions of users without sharding or reducing the consensus requirements. It applies the Cadence resource-oriented programming language for writing upgradable smart contracts. The smart contracts on the network can be used as Lego blocks to power apps. Another advantage of the Flow blockchain network is low-friction paths from fiat to crypto.
The blockchain offers grants to developers who want to build on it. It has a $725 million ecosystem fund. It empowers developers to build thriving crypto and crypto-enabled businesses. The creation of the digital assets is also available on the Flow network.
Thanks to the usability improvements, crypto traders, fans, etc. let the developers focus on the other features. FLow also supports multiple payments onramps. The Flow accounts make it easy for dApps and wallets to pay transaction fees and for the users to recover lost keys.
The ecosystem of the Flow blockchain is really rich and includes top entertainment brands. What started as a platform for just a few use cases grew in the big system, uniting thousands of developers.
FLOW is a native governance token of the network. The team prefers to consider it a keystone for a new borderless digital economy. The token powers the functioning of the Flow blockchain. It is designed as a payment method and used to pay for the transactions on the network. The FLOW coin can be staked to get rewards and participate in the validation. The coin has a total supply of 1,390 757 889 coins with over 1.04 billion currently circulating.
