Flow — An NFT-Centric Blockchain

Flow is a highly scalable blockchain designed for NFTs-centric use cases.

As well-known corporate brands establish their metaverse presence, Gaming titans such as Ubisoft collaborate with blockchain companies, and crypto exchanges become a white-label solution for gaming publishers, the demand for NFTs-centric blockchains such as Flow is unavoidable.

History of Flow

Back in 2017, Dapper Labs released Crypto Kitties. One of the very first NFT-based gaming projects on Ethereum. The strategy video game involved collecting and breeding digital cats.

The game became an instant hit. But soon pulled the Ethereum network into a problem: it was consuming a ton of resources. The network got congested. As a result, the latency in transaction confirmations increased, and the gas fees rose astronomically high.

Dapper Labs realized that Ethereum wasn't built to handle such high demands. With play-to-earn games space predicted to become increasingly popular, something needed to be done.

So instead of finding an Ethereum alternate to deploy their game on top of or waiting for a scaling solution to come about, Dapper Lab decided to build their own blockchain that they and other such large-scale NFT-based gaming projects can rely on. Then, Flow was developed.

Dapper Labs launched Flow during a public sale on CoinList for $18 million. The chain has been a massive success since its inception.

In recent years, it has collaborated with big commercial brands, such as NBA Top Shot, UFC, NFL, Samsung, Google, MotoGP, and Ubisoft.

Under the Hood

While Flow is built for speed and scalability, it also considers developer friendliness because it intends to become the de facto choice for NFT creators, digital artists, and NFT-based games.

The Multi-node Architecture

Most present-day smart contracts-based blockchains offload transactions from their mainnets to shards or layer two scaling solutions to increase the throughput. Each shard is responsible for processing a small portion of the entire transaction volume that the blockchain handles.

Flow is different. It divides the nodes into different categories based on their role in the network. Each node participates in the processing and validating every transaction on the chain but specializes in performing only a single function. This helps in achieving fast and low-latency scaling.

The developers from the Dapper Labs believe that shards aren't well suited for the streamlined functioning of smart contracts as they require parallel processing of several portions of data at once.

In other words, sharding doesn't provide a robust environment for smart contracts, decreasing their composability aspect.

Composability is the ability of smart contracts to perform efficiently, allowing developers to build dApps on top of one another. That's why Flow has opted for a multi-node architecture and has shunned sharding entirely.

Chris Dixon of a16z has an easy-to-understand analogy to get the hang of smart contracts.He refers to them like Legos. Much like you could make a structure with your legos and combine it with your friends' Legos to build something new. Smart contracts are similar; they can seamlessly plug into one another.

Instead of making every node do multiple tasks—like collection, consensus, execution, and verification—at once, Flow divides them, so each node specializes only in one of the tasks.

Here's how the responsibilities are allotted:

• The consensus nodes figure out the order of transactions on the blockchain.
• The verification nodes keep the execution nodes in check.
• The execution nodes are responsible for computation related to every transaction.
• The collection node ensures network connectivity and data availability to dApps.
  

Flow follows ACID properties for transactions: Atomic, Consistent, Isolated, and Durable. By breaking up these tasks that were otherwise mandatory on all nodes, each node now quickly parses through its work more efficiently throughout the transaction validation process.

Developers-centric

DapperLabs wanted their NFTs-focused chain to be developers friendly. They tried to make Flow the go-to choice for crypto natives to deploy their projects with the least effort.

So they choose Cadence to code their intelligent contracts and tout it as the world's first resource-oriented coding language.

Based on Diem's Move language, Cadence is fluff-proof, easy to read, simple to learn and audit, and a breeze for developers. To make the transition to Cadence smooth, developers can use a graphical user interface called Flow Playground GUI, which has an in-browser font-end app that allows the ability to experiment with the programming language.

Also, to make deploying protocols on Flow easy, Dapper Labs replaced the technical Ethereum's ERC-20/ERC-721 token standards with non-jargonish Non-Fungible Token (NFT) and Fungible Token (FT) standards. The cryptocurrency tokens that serve as a medium of exchange or governance tokens, etc., are FTs, whereas the unique non-duplicable tickets are NFTs.

Upgradable Smart Contracts

Smart contracts' immutability is one of the critical tenants of decentralization. Meaning that once a smart contract is deployed on a blockchain, it will continue to work the same until eternity.

Changing Ethereum's contract requires pushing a fix that takes weeks to implement. But what if you deploy a contract and later figure out its bugs? You'd want to tweak it before it gets exploited.

In the case of Flow, the problem was solved by putting smart contracts to the mainnet in a beta phase. This gives developers time to figure out potential threats and ensure efficient performance without getting it 100% bulletproof the first time.

Once the efficiency of a smart contract is ensured, they can exit control and turn the temporary smart contract into a final immutable one.

The FLOW token

$FLOW is the native currency for the Flow blockchain ecosystem. It's the main medium of exchange for carrying out a transaction or anything that involves interacting with smart contracts; users are supposed to pay simple processing fees or computation fees in case of complex transactions. Developers also use it for peer-to-peer payments or charging for their services. Dapps have to pay for the lease on the blockchain using FLOW.

Other features of the FLOW token include the following:

Staking $FLOW

Flow relies on the proof-of-stake consensus mechanism using a multi-node architecture, which makes Flow a network suitable for high-scale projects with heavy loads. But becoming a validator and earning staking rewards requires collateralizing a specific amount of tokens.

While validators have several different roles to choose from, choosing the one that is most needed is crucial. So, developers have designed the consensus mechanism so that a validator receives the most needed role at any given time.

Also, earning staking rewards doesn't require participating in the validation process; you can easily stake your coins and delegate the role to someone else. This way, the stakers earn rewards but will have to pay a cut to the validator for offering security, computation, and storage for the network to work properly.

$FLOW for governance

Flow is a community-governed protocol. Holding onto FLOW gives holders the veto power to vote on improvements. Once the governance is entirely on-chain, the token holders will push through network decisions, protocol modifications, and potential hard forks.

DAOs established on Flow will have governance orchestrated through Flow-based tokens.

The progressive low monetary inflation

Flow is powered by the decentralized community of validator nodes securing the network with computational operations. Other chains use distributing tokens as a means to attract validators to their networks. Distributing tokens gives rise to monetary inflation, which has obvious downsides to it.

The tokens keep on minting, and as the supply increases and the demand for these tokens remains the same, they start to plummet in value. This is why Flow has a limit on its token inflation. The developers have set it so that inflation will go down as network fees increase down the road. This will make the token deflationary, and the value will likely increase in the future.

The Ecosystem and the Future

Flow is backed by big-name crypto venture funds indulging the likes of Andreessen Horowitz, Animoca Brands, and Coinbase Ventures.

Though it's not an old blockchain ecosystem, Flow has seen massive success thanks to its native NFTs-based games, CryptoKitties, and the NBA Top Shots.

Flow is working with UFC, Ubisoft, Samsung, and Dr.Seuss, to name a few, for their NFTs projects. So far, it has announced over 2700 partnerships, including prominent entertainment brands and startups, and is home to 6000 smart contracts.

With a significant large venture backing and big corporate brands as its clientele, Flow is expected to be the frontrunner in the NFTs gaming space.  

Wrapping Up!

Flow is a proof-of-stake blockchain designed to be the foundation of Web3 and the open metaverse, supporting consumer-scale decentralized applications, NFTs, DeFi, DAOs, PFP projects, and more.

That's a wrap for today. Join our Discord server to join our community. Follow us on Twitter to stay updated with everything happening in the community.

Until then, start curating!