BlockTalks x Flow Blockchain AMA Transcript!
Hello! BlockTalkers & Blockchain Enthusiastic!
We recently hosted an AMA with Flow Blockchain, on 3rdOctober, at 1PM UTC. Many of you might have participated or many of not. But we make sure no one missed out from the knowledge shared by Weilei, Head of Developer Relations and Marketing at Flow. So here we are up with the AMA transcript, for those who missed the live session, this blog post will be a saver & feeder of knowledge for them.
INTRODUCTION
Weilei — Yes sure, I’m the Head of Developer Relations and Marketing at Flow, responsible for developer ecosystem growth and creating innovative marketing strategies. Previously I was the Head of Developer Relations at Streamr helping grow Streamr technology adoption across the world and contributing to the larger Ethereum ecosystem.
Annie — She leads the community in Asia and has a lot of experience with open source project and community growth from previous experience at Mozilla and Gitlab.
Q1. Could you please introduce Flow blockchain to our community in layman’s term?
Ans — Flow is a new layer-one blockchain built from the ground up for a new generation of consumer applications, games, and the digital assets that power them. To date, Flow has begun to onboard some of the world’s top brands, such as the NBA, UFC, Ubisoft, Warner Music Group, and Dr Seuss, and catalyzed independent developers, leading institutions, and additional infrastructure partners. Flow is built by the Dapper Labs team, creator of CryptoKitties and inventor of ERC 721 NFT standard on Ethereum. You could say our team kicked off the NFT sector, that now is worth over $100M overall.
Q2. What are the advantages of Flow Blockchain to other alternatives in the Blockchain field?
Ans — Flow’s biggest differentiator is that it already has functioning applications, nearly 100 committed venture-backed startups or enterprise developers building on top of it, and a burgeoning community that is catching up fast to the leader in the space.
Flow differentiators include:
Multi-role architecture: Flow’s core architecture is unique, allowing the network to scale to serve billions of users without sharding or reducing decentralization of consensus.
Resource-oriented programming: Flow uses Cadence, a safer and faster programming environment designed specifically for digital assets and smart contracts.
Developer ergonomics: Made by developers, for developers: Flow makes building new apps and protocols safe, fast, and efficient.
Consumer onboarding: Designed from the ground up for mainstream adoption, Flow is the only blockchain that builds usability improvements into the protocol layer.
Built-in user-base: Top developers and some of the world’s biggest brands (NBA, UFC, Dr Seuss, and more) are already building on Flow, addressing fanbases in the billions
Q3. What are the major milestones Flow Blockchain achieved so far & what are in the future pipeline?
Ans — Just in the last 3 weeks we announced a series of amazing ecosystem partners joining Flow and also NBA Top Shot launching in public beta, with over $2M revenue just in private testing
- NBA launched (https://www.coindesk.com/nba-top-shot-samsung-galaxy-store): first app on Flow mainnet, try it now nbatopshot.com
In case you missed it, Flow dropped a series of partnership announcements recently:
- Sumo Digital (a Tencent company) https://www.pocketgamer.biz/news/74642/sumo-leamington-blockchain-projects-with-dapper-labs/
- Blockletes (Turner Sports, Warner Media subsidiary) https://twitter.com/flow_blockchain/status/1311389261116182531
- Animoca (MotoGP and StarGirl) with million active users building on Flow https://decrypt.co/42603/cryptokitties-flow-blockchain-could-soon-get-1-million-new-users
- Bitkub and YouTube influencers totalling 40m+ followers https://www.newsbtc.com/press-releases/bitkub-and-leading-influencers-announced-fans-fans-token-the-token-designed-for-fans/
- Blockparty digital art marketplace https://news.bitcoin.com/dapper-labs-and-blockparty-join-forces-to-bring-a-new-breadth-of-digital-collectibles-onto-flow/
- Of course Binance and Circle https://cointelegraph.com/news/binance-usd-is-coming-to-dapper-labs-flow-blockchain
https://www.coindesk.com/dapper-labs-circle-usdc-payments-nba-top-shot
Questions Asked on Twitter to Flow Team!
Q1. Why does Flow use Cadence Programming Language instead of C++ or Java ? How does it run and What is its node operation principle in Flow ecosystem? Is it able to generate $FLOW through smart contract in SDK?
Ans — Flow is not simply taking the sharding or network segmentation scaling model and putting a few improvements on the top and calling it the key to mainstream adoption. It instead pioneered a whole new multi-node architecture, how it thinks about digital ownership with Cadence, easy account recovery, and meta transaction on the protocol layer so that it can abstract away all friction for mainstream users and complexity for ecosystem builders.
What kinds of benefits can Dapps receive when using Flow blockchain?
There are few core benefits for Dapps developers building on Flow:
- You are building on a future proof, very scalable infrastructure that big brands like NBA, UFC, Warner Music Group, Animoca Brands all trust with their billions of fans
- You have secure smart contract language like Cadence, so solves a lot of pain in bugs and attack that they saw in Solidity (real money at stake)
- You will join from day one a rich ecosystem with users already, instead of bare blockchain with only developers
Q2. Because public blockchains need users to succeed, they depend a lot on the development and participation of the community. What are Flow’s community development plans and strategies?
Ans — Flow Blockchain is an open-source helping to connect all communities building and using networks altogether.
David Broeker, head of Research at Purdue stated in the Coindesk: “If Ethereum is blockchain 2.0, then we view Flow as version 4.0. We view Flow as the blockchain technology for the mass market.”
At our Playground we had over 5,500 total contracts deployed by ecosystem developers, in addition to Open World Builders bootcamp we launched this summer that saw first cohort with over 400 applicants from 4 continents and 10+ different sectors
Currently, FLOW token Auction on CoinList will be held on Oct 6 (Coinlist.co/flow) for anyone interested
Also here is the email that CoinList sent out after community sales closed yesterday. We have achieved 2x their previous record of highest number of participants in the offering, at 12K+ committed people. Auction now is the next one.
Q3. Currently “Staking” is a very popular topic. Can you please explain the detail about the staking plan and the benefits of adding “staking”?
Ans — For community sales, tokens will vest 50% after 1 year and rest vesting monthly for 12 months afterward, while for auction, tokens will be liquid 100% after 1 year. Another difference is that for community sales the maximum amount will be $1k while there is no cap at the auction.
You will be able to delegate those locked tokens to earn node rewards. Rewards will be liquid right away without lockup.
Here is approximate example of staking rewards, annualized.
Q4. Can you explain About this SPoCKs? What’s special about this feature?
Ans — Because the Flow architecture depends on dedicated “Verifiers”, we run into the “Verifiers Dilemma”. We have our own take on how to address this problem in a lightweight way, called SPoCKs (Specialized Proofs of Confidential Knowledge) that is comparable in security TrueBit and Arbitrum, while being far more efficient. We gave an overview of this approach and how it compares to the others at Ready Layer One:
SPoCKs, the new cryptographic technique developed by the Flow team, allows an unlimited number of provers to demonstrate to a third-party observer that each of them has access to the same confidential knowledge. These proofs are non-interactive and will not leak any information regarding confidential knowledge. The SPoCK of every prover is specialized to them, and it cannot be forged or copied by any other prover. Flow rethinks many design choices for improving usability for both developers and customers, including human-readable security and upgradable smart contracts.
Q5. Why does flow separate the jobs of a validator node into 4 different roles (Collection, Consensus, Execution, & Verification)? Also, will every validator node still be able to participate in the validation of every transaction? If yes, will it be at every stage or only at one of the stages of validation?
Ans — Multi-role architecture means the network has specialized nodes to do specific tasks instead of all nodes doing the same
In a traditional blockchain, every node stores the entire state (account balances, smart contract code, etc.) and performs all of the work associated with processing every transaction in the chain. This is analogous to having a single worker build an entire car.
From manufacturing to CPU design, pipelining is a common technique for dramatically scaling up productivity. Flow applies pipelining to blockchains by separating the jobs of a validator node into four different roles: Collection, Consensus, Execution, and Verification. This separation of labor between nodes is vertical (across the different validation stages for each transaction) rather than horizontal (across different transactions, as with sharding).
In other words, every validator node still participates in the validation of every transaction, but they do so only at one of the stages of validation. They can therefore specialize for — and greatly increase the efficiency of — their particular stage of focus.
Recently, Flow has had hundreds of node validators running all of the 4 nodes.
Questions Asked by our BlockTalks Community Members during live Session to the Flow Blockchain Team!
Q1. Can you list 2–3 killer feature of Flow Blockchain that attract any user toward your platform? What are your marketing strategy for global expanetion?
Ans — As mentioned earlier, Built-in user-base is one of key strength of Flow blockchain. What few very other blockchains can actually deliver. Offering a new scalable and future proof layer one blockchain solution is not only about delivering the best technology possible, but also making sure you have a strong Go-To- Market strategy to bootstrap the ecosystem with both builders and users.
That is what makes Flow so unique. Global brands like NBA, UFC, Samsung, Ubisoft, Animoca Brands, UFC to build on Flow or suporting to the ecosystem because they trust we will give the best experience possible to users
Q2. As a layer-1 blockchain, does that mean you’re less efficient than layer-2 blockchains?
Ans — Not at all — Flow is a new layer-one blockchain built from the ground up for a new generation of consumer applications, games, and the digital assets that power them.
Flow is based on a novel architecture that achieves the performance required for mainstream applications without compromising decentralization or sharding the network. This means developers on Flow can build secure and composable applications to enable new possibilities for consumers around the world.
Q3. How difficult is it to move a dapp from Ethereum to Flow? How will Flow deal with the cost of providing proof of status for large volumes of transactions per second?
Ans — Acautlly Ethereum is an incredibly important project and both CryptoKitties and Cheeze Wizards have smart contracts that will continue to live on the Ethereum network.
Dapper Wallet will also continue to be compatible with Ethereum, so we will continue supporting the ecosystem. That said, it’s likely that future applications intended for mainstream audiences built by Dapper Labs or its partners will be built on Flow, as only Flow can offer the scalability and UX possible to attract hundreds of millions of mainstream users.
Q4. What is your strongest advantage that you think will make your team leading the market? In contrast, what is your weakness? How do you plan to overcome it?
Ans — Flow is not simply taking the sharding or network segmentation scaling model and putting a few improvements on the top and calling it the key to mainstream adoption.
It instead pioneered a whole new multi-node architecture, how it thinks about digital ownership with Cadence, easy account recovery, and meta transaction on the protocol layer so that it can abstract away all friction for mainstream users and complexity for ecosystem builders.
Even though there are already exsiting public blockchain that build their ecosystem earlier — but I think Flow has the fully ecosystem and user base than any other public blockchain.
Q5. What are the first steps to take to start building on Flow? What benefits does FLOW offer to developers?
Ans — Playground is the best place you can try on immediatly:
Developers are always free to generate and issue their own currencies on Flow, the FLOW token will always have the most usage, liquidity, and acceptance on the platform.
Here are some important links of Flow Blockchain👇
Official Website — https://www.onflow.org/
YouTube — https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs9r5lqmYQsKCpLB9jKwocg
Twitter — https://twitter.com/flow_blockchain
Telegram —https://t.me/flow_blockchain
Discord — https://discord.com/invite/yY4zbvf
