The Flow Blockchain

Last week our portfolio company Dapper Labs, the maker of CryptoKitties, CheezeWizards, and soon NBA Top Shot, all crypto games, announced the development of the Flow blockchain.

You might ask “why do we need yet another blockchain?” and you would be right to ask that.

The answer is that Dapper has built several games on Ethereum, one of them a top-three smart contract this year (CryptoKitties) and they have found it challenging to build the games they want to create on that platform. They looked around at all of the other options and could not find a blockchain that addressed all of their issues. So they are building Flow.

Here’s a primer on Flow.

And here are the technical papers.

From that primer:

Flow’s technical architecture balances three priorities:
Scaling with Full Composability: Flow improves throughput without breaking up the network shared state. This preserves a developer-friendly environment for applications, making it much easier to write secure and composable code. 
Speed and Efficiency: Flow is capable of handling the transaction volume needed to support modern consumer applications while consuming a tiny fraction of the computing resources needed by current networks.
Decentralized Participation: The security of a decentralized system is directly related to the number of independent participants working to secure the network. Flow supports large numbers of participants with a range of technical and financial commitments, resulting in a system that’s cheap to join while being costly to subvert. 

If you are building a game, a collectibles experience, or some other mainstream consumer decentralized application, you should check out Flow. You can do that here.

And if you want to engage with Flow and the Flow community, you can do that here.

#blockchain#crypto

Comments (Archived):

  1. awaldstein

    Been following this.Curious and logical to see Dapper reconceptualize themselves as an entertainment/media company. Mashup and next gen EA/Ubisoft of sorts.Lots of questions on Wave that i need to understand and will dig into your links.Top two are whether they are incorporating ERC 998 from Ethereum (which I applaud if so) and also whether they have changed how scarcity is approached from the original NFT definition (which concerns me if so).This piece by one of their people made me question the scarcity piece. https://nfty.substack.com/p

  2. Kelly LeValley Hunt

    NFTs will replace Air miles, Hotel Rewards points, in store refund credits etc. What is exciting to me is that in 2 to 5 years I will be able to look at my Wallet and my Crypto, NFTs, ERC Tokens relating to the various purchases I’ve made or even exchanges/ refunds. I will see all this in one glance instead of trying to keep up with the value and the number of each one.

    1. ldouglas

      It’s pretty interesting, indeed. Add in the features like shelf life, useful life, depletion, and such and you have a fantastic bidirectional tool for current-state-of-economy, both personally an commercially.hmm, what if existence is just one big NFT blockchain. 🙂

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  3. William Mougayar

    I found their FAQ to be also an important read, especially as it clarifies what happens to an existing CryptoKitty and how they plan to continue supporting Ethereum. https://www.withflow.org/faqThere are some interesting tech innovations such as the breaking up of nodes into 4 different functions and the separation of computation from transaction processing (that last one is not new, but its implementation in this case would be).I see this emerging initially as a special purpose blockchain, optimized for game & entertainment use cases, and then we will see how that evolves. Exciting to see diversification in this space.(Disclosure: I’ve been an investor in each of their past 3 rounds, including this one)

    1. awaldstein

      So you see CryptoKities/Ethereum as a direction with development and market resources towards it rather than legacy support?

      1. William Mougayar

        Not for future development, but for supporting existing assets and then we’ll see what other kinds of interoperabilities would exist in the future.

        1. awaldstein

          as i thought.i understand entertainment/media/game company stuff well as grew up with it.smart direction. tech as tool and disposable as it should be.

  4. DJL

    So this is the type of thing that might rescue ETH from the Ether. People start building toolkits on top of it to enable real apps.My question would be the intellectual property. If I start a company (game) based on other peoples IP how does that work?

    1. jason wright

      It’s still their IP. Ask nicely 🙂

  5. JamesHRH

    So, crypto is basically a SW design choice at this point?

    1. sigmaalgebra

      So, MasterCard, Visa, Citi, Chase, Amazon, Walmart, Fidelity, FedEx, etc. should all ditch their uses of relational database — DB/2, Oracle, SQL Server, etc. — and switch to blockchain?

      1. JamesHRH

        They could. But apparently they see no reason to do so.Regardless, no one but the SW Dev service providers will make any $ off of it.

  6. Richard

    We need a Decentralized Press – on a blockchain. Look at the legacy products – Re visit the press week by week the past 3 years – (start with meet the press). Its irrelevant and of no value to mainstream Main Street Americans. This is the blockchain killer app.

  7. awaldstein

    From the outside it is hard to know of course.When I think of being an entertainment company I think content and brand first, an umbrella studio which develops tools but is not defined by them.They are blazing new ground for certain.

  8. awaldstein

    I know less and still blogging!