Flow Blockchain: Tailored for Consumer Apps — Insights from Brian Astrove and the Flow Team

Flow, the home of consumer crypto, was designed from the ground up to overcome key limitations faced by other networks. In a recent Denarii Labs session, Brian Astrove from Flow’s business development team recently shared insights into the network’s creation and its unique capabilities.

Flow’s Genesis was a Response to Scalability Challenges

When CryptoKitties launched on Ethereum in 2017, it exposed the network’s inability to handle mainstream consumer applications. This catalyst led to the development of Flow, a blockchain purpose-built for next-gen apps, games, and the digital assets that power them.

Innovative Multi-Role Architecture

Flow’s multi-role architecture separates tasks across different node types, effectively solving the “blockchain trilemma” by balancing scalability, efficiency, and cost. This design enables higher throughput, lower gas fees, and greater energy efficiency compared to traditional blockchain architectures.

Cadence Empowers Developers

Cadence, Flow’s native smart contract language, simplifies the creation of digital assets. Its resource-oriented architecture enables a developer-friendly protocol designed for consumer-grade safety. Any Cadence deployed today is immutable and future compatible; no manual updates required.

Proven for Mainstream Adoption

Flow has demonstrated its ability to handle high-demand applications without compromising user experience. Over 45-million people have used products on Flow, including offerings from top-tier creators like NBA, NFL, Disney, and industry leaders such as Mattel and LiveNation/Ticketmaster. Notably, most of these users didn’t even know they were using a blockchain.

Crescendo Was a Game-Changing Upgrade

The recent Crescendo upgrade introduced full EVM equivalence to Flow. This allows any smart contract or protocol that works on Ethereum mainnet or an EVM L2 to function out of the box on Flow. Developers can now access Flow’s benefits — scale to millions without sharding, fast and cost-effective transactions, and MEV resilience — while leveraging Ethereum’s liquidity and infrastructure. Since 2020, there have been 4800 smart contracts deployed on Flow. Within a few weeks of the Crescendo upgrade, 3000 more have been deployed on the Flow EVM.

Consumer Crypto Simplifies User Onboarding

Flow is driving blockchain adoption by simplifying user onboarding through protocol-level account abstraction. Users can create smart contract wallets using social logins or email, eliminating complex wallet setup processes and making blockchain applications more accessible to mainstream audiences.]

Flow Leads Consumer Crypto

The home of consumer Web3, Flow is a robust platform for developers to create the next generation of consumer-focused blockchain applications.