Flow：The Dark Horse of the Metaverse Era

2022-02-24, 05:09

[TL; DR]

1. The top five public blockchains are Ethereum, Ronin, Solana, Flow, and WAX, according to the total sales on the NFT blockchain.
2. Flow, a new dark horse of NFT public blockchain rising in 2021, intends to be a more applicable public blockchain for next-gen applications, games, and digital assets.
3. The current total transaction volume of NBA Top Shot has reached $899,158,083, making NBA Top Shot the project with the largest transaction volume on the Flow chain. It ranks fifth in the mainstream NFT series.
4. The FLOW token is native to the Flow blockchain. FLOW has various functions such as paying transaction fees, governance tokens, mortgage, and payment channels.
5. Flow utilizes its self-built programming language Cadence, which makes Flow more resource-oriented in programming.

2021 was the year of the NFTs. We witnessed the rise of various types of NFTs such as digital collections, NFT avatars, GameFi, and Metaverse properties. Actually, the growth of NFT is inseparable from the upgrading of related infrastructure, including NFT exchanges. And among them, one of the most crucial parts is the building of the NFT public blockchain.

Data source: cryptoslam.io

At present, the top five public blockchains are Ethereum, Ronin, Solana, Flow, and WAX, according to the total sales on the NFT blockchain.

Among them, Ethereum is the most secure with the largest number of nodes. It is the birthplace of DeFi and NFT ecological systems, as well as the well-deserved king of public blockchains. A majority of blue-chip NFTs, including the recent champion Bored Ape Yacht Club (Bored Ape) and CryptoPunks, the second most sold, are traded on Ethereum.=
Specially designed for Axie Infinity, Ronin is an Ethereum side chain that provides Axie with a high-speed and cheap game transaction experience. Axie Infinity is a leading blockchain game.

Its popularity has also made Ronin a major public blockchain player in the NFT field. Besides, Solana is a high-performance public blockchain. Ambitiously, it recently deployed lots of projects in the NFT field. At present, some quality projects including Star Atlas have been launched in the Solana ecosystem.

Data source: cryptoslam.io

However, Flow is the dark horse of the new NFT public blockchain. It launched a public offering on Coinlist in October 2020.

On February 6, 2022, the NFT transaction volume on the Flow chain surpassed $900 million, an all-time high. Dapper Labs, which developed the Flow public blockchain, is also the developer of CryptoKitties which went viral on Ethereum in 2017. Solana, Avalanche, and other high-performance public blockchains aim to become Ethereum killers', while Flow has been designed at the beginning to be a more applicable public blockchain for the next-generation applications, games, and digital assets.

Dapper Labs worked together with the NBA to create an NFT series - NBA Top Shot at the end of October 2020. NBA Top Shot is a collection of exciting moments in the NBA historical games. It became popular in the first and second quarters of 2021. This helped Dapper Labs win up to $305 million in financing in March 2021. Michael Jordan, Aaron Gordon, and many other retired or active NBA stars had also been involved in this financing. For NBA Top Shot, NFTs are in the form of card packs, each of which contains 3 to 10 virtual cards. These virtual cards are the wonderful shots of NBA stars, called Moments. NBA Top Shot caught the eye of NBA fans and NFT players as soon as it was released. It is reported that about 80% of its total buyers are not senior cryptocurrency players, but just pure basketball enthusiasts or collectors. In May of 2021, the number of its users reached one million, and it achieved over $700 million in transaction volume within the first six months of its launch. The current total transaction volume of NBA Top Shot has reached $899,158,083, making NBA Top Shot the project with the largest transaction volume on the Flow chain. It ranks fifth in the mainstream NFT series.

Technically, Flow utilizes its self-built programming language Cadence, which makes it more resource-oriented in programming. In the blockchain, there is no so-called central smart contract, but accounts are set up in the system. Various resources are directly stored in the storage layer of the account, and assets can also be directly allocated to the corresponding accounts. That’s why asset storage on the Flow chain is more secure and decentralized. In addition, Flow's low-lag and high-performance features make it more suitable for convenient and quick NFTs trading. The native token on the Flow blockchain is FLOW. It has various functions such as paying transaction fees, governance tokens, mortgage, and payment channels.

Moreover, Flow blockchain has a native wallet application called the Dapper Wallet. Users will store tokens and NFTs in the wallet. In the future, DeFi applications of NFTs will also be developed on the Flow blockchain to help users better utilize the value of NFTs. There are also third-party NFT trading platforms such as Starly and VIV3 on the Flow chain, which makes it convenient for users to enjoy easy and fast NFT transactions.

Author: Edward. H, Gate.io Researcher
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