Flow Network
Flow is a fast, secure, and developer-friendly blockchain built to support the next generation of games, apps, and the digital assets that power them.
Flow, a fast and developer-friendly blockchain built to support entire ecosystems of apps, games, and the digital assets that power them.
Every other decentralized blockchain’s plans for scaling depend on some kind of sharding or side chains. Unfortunately, our team recognized early on that these approaches make interactivity between smart contracts significantly more complex and error-prone.
In other words, sharding is a good solution for payments, but not for an ecosystem of complex applications like games or social networks.
After nearly two years of research, Dapper Labs is happy to present Flow, a blockchain design that can meet mainstream developer and consumer expectations without sharding the network or compromising decentralization.
Flow has a pipelined architecture that separates the jobs typically done by a single node across five different node types, significantly reducing redundant effort and improving efficiency. To support this approach, the Flow team developed a new cryptographic technique called Specialized Proofs of Confidential Knowledge (SPoCKs) to address the Verifier’s Dilemma.
Flow rethinks many other design choices to improve usability for developers and consumers alike, including upgradable smart contracts, human-readable security, and more. The protocol is secured via a variant of HotStuff, a Proof of Stake consensus algorithm developed by VMware Research.
This approach empowers developers to safely and easily build on top of each others’ code, creating entirely new products and services at an accelerating pace. This is known as composability.
Flow is a dependable platform for applications that can provide entirely new features and benefits to their users.
Examples of experiences that can be powered by Flow include: artists or bands using crypto tokens to give millions of fans unprecedented new ways to show their fandom; games that reward players for adding value and enable assets and identities that users can take across infinite open environments; or platforms for sports fans around the world to trade verified, authentic, limited-edition digital memorabilia in real-time.
Users of Dapper Wallet and players of CryptoKitties and Cheeze Wizards, will be the first to receive early access to see, test, and play with upcoming experiences on Flow.
Once Flow is live, players will be able to use Dapper Wallet to take CryptoKitties into applications on Flow, benefiting from a new universe of games and other apps that will emerge there.
