Flow was founded by Dapper Labs, a blockchain technology company based in Vancouver, Canada. Dapper Labs was founded by CEO Roham Gharegozlou and CTO Dieter Shirley.

Dapper Labs was the original creator behind Flow blockchain as well as Cryptokitties, Dapper, and NBA Top Shot. Founded in 2018, Dapper Labs uses blockchain technology to bring new forms of digital engagement to users around the world. Blockchain-enabled applications can bring fans closer with the brands they love, give people a real stake in the communities they contribute to, and create new ways for consumers to become creators themselves. Publicly-announced Dapper Labs partners include the NBA and NBPA, Warner Music Group and UFC. Notable investors in Dapper Labs include Andreessen Horowitz, Union Square Ventures, Venrock, Google Ventures, Samsung, and the founders of Dreamworks, Reddit, Coinbase, Zynga, and AngelList, among others.

Learning from and improving upon existing solutions, Flow provides:

Multi-role architecture: Flow’s design allows the network to scale to serve billions of users without sharding or reducing decentralization of consensus.

Resource-oriented programming: Smart contracts on Flow are written in Cadence, an easy and safe programming language for crypto assets and apps.

Developer ergonomics: From upgradeable smart contracts to the Flow Emulator, this network is designed for those who want to build valuable products for the community.

Consumer onboarding: Flow was designed for mainstream consumers, with payment onramps enabling a safe and low-friction path from fiat currencies to crypto.

The platform prioritizes developer accessibility in order to help developers build more powerful apps in less time. Flow supports a range of programming languages, including JavaScript, Go and Cadence, a language tailored for smart contracts.

Flow's sharding architecture partitions the network into different shards that can handle transactions independently, allowing for fast scaling and high throughput. The network can also increase the number of shards as necessary to meet increasing demand, helping DApps to scale faster.

The circulating supply is 1,036,200,000 FLOW tokens, at the time of writing.

The FLOW token (“FLOW”) is the native currency for the Flow network and the keystone for a new, inclusive, and borderless digital economy. If Flow is the digital infrastructure, FLOW token is the fuel that powers the network.

FLOW is the currency required for the network and all the applications on top of it to function. FLOW is designed as a payment method as well as a long-term reserve asset for the entire Flow economy. The token is used by validators, developers, and users to participate in the FLOW network and earn rewards. It is also used for fees and to participate in future protocol governance.

Regarding the tokenomics of FLOW, the allocation is as follows: pre launch backers and community sale (374.8M), development team (225M), Dapper Labs (250M), ecosystem reserve (400.2M), staking rewards (99.4M).

The Flow Network's security combines smart contracts, a robust consensus mechanism, and cryptographic protocols.

Cadence, a secure and developer-friendly programming language, is used to write smart contracts on the Flow Network; the contracts undergo extensive testing and verification to ensure that they work as intended and cannot be altered by malicious actors.

The Flow Network’s consensus mechanism is based on a modified version of the HotStuff algorithm, which provides fast finality, high scalability and security while maintaining decentralization. It ensures all network participants agree on the state of the network at any given time.

Learn more about what Web3 cryptocurrencies are.

What is Proof-of-Stake? Learn more with the CMC glossary.

Check out our guide for how smart contracts work.

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