It Might Soon Be Flow Time

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• Token Distribution, Economics, and Technical Papers

 

Project summary

Many of you are likely familiar with CryptoKitties, one of the earliest NFT projects and perhaps the first to truly capture mainstream attention when it heavily congested Ethereum during its release week from 28th November 2017. Pending transactions spiked from under 2,000 to over 11,000, and the CryptoKitties contract address accounted for almost 12% of all transactions on the network during this period. Dapper Labs, the company behind the project, has since been hard at work raising funding from world-class backers and figuring out how best to leverage the learnings from building the world’s largest blockchain game (by USD traded, which is ~$38 million). What they arrived at were three things: 

1) A total equity funding of $52.5MM with big traditional names such as USV, Samsung Ventures, a16z, Venrock, and Warner Music Group.

2) Flow—a purpose-built blockchain promising to power the next generation of apps, games, and virtual goods.

3) Raised a further $18M specifically for Flow via a token sale on CoinList.

Flow describes itself as “the blockchain for open worlds”, and looks to deliver a fast, decentralized, and developer-friendly blockchain tailored for that domain. It does this by employing a novel multi-role architecture which allows consensus to be separated from compute, theoretically bending the rules of The Scalability Trilemma. Crucially, the network’s design focuses on being able to scale without sharding whilst preserving ACID guarantees—important for composability and safe transactions with large-scale concurrency (listen for 2 minutes from playhead).

There are extensive details on the pro