Abstract

Originally conceived by the team behind CryptoKitties, Flow is a decentralized network supported and built on by a growing community of brands and Web3 builders. For e.g NBA Topshot marketplace is built on Flow. This paper describes the approach at the core of the Flow architecture: splitting consensus (selection and ordering of transactions) from compute (executing each transaction and recording its output) and proves this can dramatically increase throughput without compromising security. This paper also analyses how the Flow architecture increases performance, preserves ACID guarantees, and proves that it does not compromise security. The result is a throughput increase by a factor of 56 compared to conventional architectures without loss of safety or decentralization. The paper also notes that a working system based on these ideas must verify the computation, but that its key result is applicable regardless of how that problem is addressed.