FLOWETH
Flow / Ethereum
crypto

Flow is a blockchain created by Dapper Labs that aims to make it easy for developers to build decentralized applications and businesses. Flow uses a multi-role architecture design to scale the network instead of sharding. One of the fundamental reasons Dapper Labs opted to shift away from Ethereum and build its own general-purpose blockchain was to avoid the complexity of sharding. Flow asserts that its scaling-without-sharding strategy will improve network speed and throughput while preserving composability standards and a developer-friendly, ACID-compliant environment. There are four pillars at the foundation of the Flow blockchain: Multi-role architecture Resource-oriented programming Developer ergonomics Consumer onboarding Multi-role architecture Flow's design is unique, allowing the network to scale to serve billions of users without sharding or reducing the decentralization of consensus. Flow pipelines the work of a blockchain miner or validator across four different roles that all require staking; a separation of concerns that significantly reduces redundant effort. Epochs will reflect the plans outlined in this document - Incentives in a Multi-Role Blockchain while challenge arbitration will in Flow is described in this technical paper - Execution Verification. Resource-oriented programming Smart contracts on Flow are written in Cadence, a new programming language for cryptoassets and apps that builds on the concepts of resource-oriented programming which prioritizes ease of use for developers. Using Cadence, developers will be able to create unique and durable digital artifacts where ownership is tracked by the language itself. Flow envisions that this design will enable a powerful new category of applications. Developers can try Cadence on the Flow Playground. Developer ergonomics Flow includes a number of features informed by Dapper Labs' experience building some of the most used dapps of all time, including CryptoKitties. For example, Flow enables upgradeable smart contracts to allow developers to deploy smart contracts to the mainnet in a "beta state", where the code can be incrementally updated by the original authors. Users will be alerted to the unfinished nature of this code, and can choose to wait until the code is finalized before interacting with it. Once authors are confident that their code is safe, they can irrevocably release their control on the contract, and then remains immutable on the Flow blockchain for all time. This balances the best-practices of product development (early iteration and refinement) with the smart contract benefits of trustless, immortal code. Consumer onboarding The native account model on Flow is designed to provide a series of benefits to improve the experience for all users, from rank beginners to seasoned experts. For example, there are hooks built into the protocol to allow account recovery flows for users who lose their keys and optional multi-sig support with the ability to frequently cycle keys for advanced use cases. General Tech stack overview The entirety of the node software is currently written in the Go programming language. This includes basic storage (BadgerDB), networking (libp2p), consensus algorithm (self implemented HotStuff), execution storage (self implemented binary Merkle tree), execution environment (Cadence) and all supporting components. The codebase is generally split into sections related to each of the roles: Access, Collection, Consensus, Execution and Verification, with the exception being shared components, such as caching, networking and cryptography. The Flow blockchain programming language, Cadence lives in a separate repo and is maintained separately.