Flow (FLOW)

Flow (FLOW) is the native cryptocurrency of the Flow blockchain, a proof-of-stake network built by Dapper Labs for games, digital collectibles and consumer apps. FLOW pays transaction and storage fees, is staked by node operators and delegators to secure the network, and is used as a currency inside apps built on the chain. Flow is best known as the home of NBA Top Shot, a marketplace for officially licensed basketball highlight clips.

The coin should be kept apart from the network it runs on and from the collectibles traded there, which are non-fungible tokens rather than FLOW itself. Development and grants are overseen by the Flow Foundation, while Dapper Labs remains the best-known company building on the chain. Flow sits alongside other gaming-focused networks such as Immutable (IMX) and the Ronin chain behind Axie Infinity (AXS).

Think of a large sports arena. A small blockchain is like an arena where one usher sells tickets, checks bags, seats people and cleans up, so the queue at the gate grows quickly on a big night. Flow splits those jobs between different teams: one group collects incoming requests, another agrees on their order, another does the heavy work, and a fourth checks that the work was done honestly. Each team only has to be good at its own job.

The aim is to let millions of ordinary fans buy and swap digital items without knowing much about crypto. FLOW is the money that keeps the arena running. Visitors spend tiny amounts of it on fees, and people who lock up FLOW to help run the arena earn new FLOW as a reward.

Dapper Labs grew out of the team behind CryptoKitties, a 2017 game whose popularity clogged the Ethereum Blockchain and convinced its developers that mass-market apps needed a different design. Flow's mainnet launched in 2020, starting with an initial supply of 1.25 billion FLOW, and NBA Top Shot opened to the public the same year before a trading boom in early 2021. NFL All Day, UFC Strike and Disney Pinnacle later launched on the network. In September 2024 the Crescendo upgrade brought full compatibility with the Ethereum Virtual Machine and version 1.0 of Cadence, Flow's own smart contract language.

Flow uses proof of stake with a multi-role architecture. Instead of every node doing everything, the network separates the work:

• Collection nodes. They gather incoming transactions into batches.
• Consensus nodes. They agree on the order of those batches and form blocks.
• Execution nodes. They run the transactions and compute the new state of the chain.
• Verification nodes. They check the execution nodes' results and can challenge errors.

Since Crescendo, Flow runs two environments on one chain: the original Cadence environment and an EVM environment, so developers can use either Cadence or familiar Ethereum tools. Holders can delegate FLOW to node operators without running hardware and share in the rewards; see staking.

FLOW has no fixed maximum supply. New tokens are minted at the end of each epoch to pay staking rewards, but transaction fees collected during the epoch are counted against that amount, so the network issues only the difference:

• $N$ is the number of new FLOW minted at the end of the epoch.
• $R_{\text{target}}$ is the total reward the protocol intends to pay stakers for the epoch.
• $F$ is the transaction fees collected during the same epoch.

If the target reward for an epoch were 1{,}000{,}000 FLOW and users paid 50{,}000 FLOW in fees, the network would mint $1{,}000{,}000 - 50{,}000 = 950{,}000$ new FLOW. Higher usage therefore means less new issuance for the same reward. In February 2026 the Flow Foundation also burned about 50 million FLOW, roughly 3 percent of supply, as part of a wider change to its tokenomics.

On 26 and 27 December 2025 an attacker used a type-confusion flaw in the Cadence runtime to create counterfeit copies of FLOW and several other tokens. About $3.9 million of value was moved off the network through bridges before validators halted transactions and put the chain into read-only mode. The Foundation first proposed rolling the chain back to a checkpoint before the attack, but dropped the idea after objections from developers and bridge operators, and chose an "isolated recovery" that kept legitimate history and destroyed the counterfeit tokens. Cadence transactions resumed on 29 December and the EVM side on 2 January 2026. Several exchanges returned or destroyed counterfeit FLOW that had been deposited with them.

In 2021 buyers of Top Shot Moments sued Dapper Labs in New York, arguing that the collectibles were unregistered securities. In February 2023 the judge refused to dismiss the case, finding the claims plausible under the Howey test. Dapper settled in 2024 for $4 million without admitting wrongdoing and agreed to hand control of its remaining FLOW to the Foundation. Critics point to the chain's early reliance on a single company, the fall in collectible trading after 2021, and the December 2025 halt, which showed that validators could stop the network in an emergency. FLOW is listed on major cryptocurrency exchanges, and its price has been volatile.

• Flow
• Flow developer documentation
• Flow Foundation: December 27 technical post-mortem