Flow ecosystem, by description, is a decentralized protocol that has a unique multi-chain infrastructure. This network lets users create crypto apps using several features and tools to boost speed, usability, and scalability. Hence, Flow is a fast, secure, and developer-friendly blockchain.
This blockchain is designed to support the next generation of apps, games, and the digital assets that power them. Flow (FLOW) is also described as an Ethereum-based network that is designed to support internet-scale protocols and applications to enhance a user-friendly experience.
Flow (FLOW) token is the native currency on Flow’s blockchain and the principal reserve asset of the network. Validators, developers, and users that participate in the network use the FLOW token to earn rewards and also determine future changes in the protocol and its governance.
The Flow ecosystem has its FLOW token used by the developers, validators, and users to participate in the platform’s governance and, in turn, earn rewards. Dapper Labs developed Flow blockchain in 2018 and it uses the technology to experiment and introduce new features for the DeFi sector and crypto community.
Since the launch of Flow, Dapper Labs has been striving to connect fans globally and offer consumers the chance to become creators. Some of the notable Dapper Labs partners include Warner Music Group, NBA, and the UFC.
Features Of The Flow Ecosystem
Flow comprises a multi-role infrastructure well-designed to serve billions of users worldwide. Notably, its unique design supports greater scalability without having to collapse the network. Hence, it achieves the needed performance for mainstream applications without sharding the system or compromising its decentralization.
Multi-Node Architecture
The Flow ecosystem applies pipelining, which is a common technique that significantly scales up productivity by dividing the work of validators into four roles.
- Collection nodes enhance network connectivity and data availability for apps built on the protocol.
- The consensus nodes decide on the presence and order of all transactions on the entire blockchain.
- The execution nodes are needed to perform all the computation that is related to each transaction.
- Finally, the verification nodes keep the execution nodes in check.
Verification and Consensus Nodes are the fundamental structures of the protocol’s security. They are designed to leverage economic incentives to maintain the network’s accountability and functioning. If one dishonest Collection or Execution Node brings in incorrect data, any other role is allowed to punish them and trigger efficient recovery from that invalid data.
The Collection and Execution nodes have critical roles since they optimize the scalability and security of the network. Moreover, the nodes can be verified using other roles. All of the validators participate in the validation of each transaction in the network, although they do so at their respective stage. This enables validators to focus on their specified roles in the protocol, which increases efficiency.
Jobs separation runs across various validation stages for every transaction, instead of relying on sharding to boost scalability. The issue that arises from fragmenting a blockchain into intertwined networks is that serializability guarantees are lost. This loss makes transactions more difficult.
A majority of the users cannot validate blocks in all of the shards. Whenever they want to interact with a particular shard, they cannot authenticate or determine its whole history. By dividing the tasks of a validator into various roles, the Flow ecosystem scales to higher throughput, low cost, and maintains a community where all the participants have a critical role to make the system work effectively.
Moreover, the programmability layer at the Flow protocol enables smart contracts and users to interact with one another within a single transaction. Developers can share their work with the other developers on the network.
Resource-Oriented Programming
The Flow ecosystem uses Cadence, which is a resource-oriented programming language that has an easy-to-read ergonomic syntax. Cadence also has a type system that mitigates runtime errors. It is well-designed to support all methods, interfaces, and transactions to include the pre and post-conditions that enforce the expected behavior.
Flow protocol has a Flow playground for the developers who wish to know about Cadence and how to start developing applications on it. The new parading is designed to be secure and easy to use for most of the developers since Cadence tracks the ownership of each application that developers make.
Other tools available in the network for the users include the Flow Go SDK that enables developers to work on the backend integration with high scalability. It has now become one of the most popular backend programming languages as a result of its high performance.
This protocol also introduces the Flow JavaScript SDK, which is designed mainly for frontend developers who want to integrate and interact with Flow. Developers can easily build dApps without an application binary interface (ABI) and use them for their businesses.
Additionally, the protocol is designed suitably for all the developers that want to build valuable products for the community. Interestingly, the developers are allowed to upgrade smart contracts and use Flow Emulator to deliver development experience. The Flow ecosystem has proven to be quite friendly for mainstream consumers with payments on-ramps using other tokens apart from FLOW and fiat too.
Flow’s Advantages Over The Other Blockchains
Dapper Labs developed the Flow ecosystem to support many consumer applications with the essential throughput to scale to millions of different active users. The protocol offers many technical innovations, which include:
- Single shared state for all the smart contracts on the network, with transactions having full ACID (serializability) without having to shard the system.
- Pipelined architecture has many validator roles to boost security, performance, and scalability.
- Set of tools to give developers the best experience and expertise to create applications on the protocol.
