Flow Ecosystem (FLOW) – The World of NFTs and Collectibles

Flow is considered a convergence of extremely prominent NFTs in the market. So are there any notable projects on the Flow ecosystem? Find out now!

In the past time, the ecosystem has continuously grown strongly, and the attention for NFT projects has not been less.

NFT projects are growing rapidly and are relatively hot, finding investment opportunities in blockchains specializing in NFT is an option worth considering.

In this article, I will walk with you through an extremely prominent NFT-specialized ecosystem in the market – Flow.

Are there any arrays on this blockchain? Are there any notable NFT projects on the Flow ecosystem? We will find out through the next article!

Overview of Flow Blockchain

What is Blockchain Flow?

Flow is a highly scalable blockchain, with fast transaction speeds, low transaction fees, and guaranteed security.

From the beginning, Flow focused on Dapps Games (Decentralized Games), collectibles (collectibles) and the applications that interact with them.

Flow was built by Dapper Labs, the team that developed CryptoKitties – a very popular Blockchain pet game in 2018.

What’s outstanding about Flow?

The main highlight of Flow is Flow’s multi-tier architecture.

In most Blockchains, the Nodes in the validator (Validation) store all information (account balances, Smart Contract Code, …) and perform all transactions related to transaction processing on the blockchain. Chain.

However, with Flow it is different, they separate the other tasks into 4 roles:

• Collection: Collection nodes increase efficiency.
• Consensus: Consensus nodes ensure decentralization.
• Execution: Execution nodes enable speed and scale.
• Verification: Verification nodes ensure correctness.

Outstanding parameters

Outstanding parameters of blockchain Flow:

• Number of nodes: 377 Nodes;
• Number of delegators: 12,534 Delegators;
• Average Block Time: 2.91s;
• Block Height: 19,014,632;
• Staking Ratio: 66.01%;
• Marketcap: 1.2 billion dollars
• Beta Mainnet v0.1: June 2020.

History, current situation and roadmap

Flow has gone through many testnet and mainnet phases in the past:

• Flow Developer Preview (December 2019): Allows the development of Dapps and smart contracts on the network, used by Dapper Labs to develop NBA Topshot;
• Flow MVP (January 2020):
• Dev Portal (March 2020): Recruit more developers to Cadence with hackathon;
• Multi-Node (March 2020): Enable node running mechanism with different functions for each node, allowing for high optimization and specialization;
• Beta Mainnet v0.1 (June 2020): Start running smart contracts with real users, start the network;
• Token Generation Event (September 2020): Token FLOW officially opened for sale on Coinlist;

Investor and project development team

Flow has a lot of investors in the platform, including many of the major VCs in the market. The list of all VCs you can see here.

In particular, Flow has the participation of many large VCs such as Animoca Brands, a16z crypto, CoinFund, Coinbase Ventures, Digital Currency Group, Dapper Labs, Union Square Ventures,…

With the investment participation of many large funds in the market, this will certainly be a huge factor participating in the future boom of the Flow ecosystem.

Pieces of the Flow ecosystem

An overview of the puzzle pieces on Flow was collected from various sources, including Flowverse – a website about Flow’s ecosystem that has quite a lot of information about projects on the system.

Overview of Flow and the Flow ecosystem

DEX

Flow has a single DEX that is BloctoSwap:

BloctoSwap – a DEX is already operating on Flow Ecosystem, with 4 main assets being traded: the project’s BLT token, FLOW, FUSD (stablecoin on Flow), and tUSDT.

BloctoSwap is the only DEX that has released a product and has been beta running on Flow.

In addition to basic liquidity and swap functionality, this DEX also has a bridge to bring USDT from Ethereum to Flow, and wrap it to tUSDT.

Although it is the only DEX, the liquidity and volume of this AMM DEX is still very small: 24h volume is only $250,000. This proves that this is just the beginning stage of DEX exchanges on the Flow ecosystem.

In addition, the Blocktoswap project has many other products such as NFT market. The project has just launched tokens on various chains (including Solana, BSC).

My personal experience with this DEX is quite good, moreover, Blocto’s backer is also a lot of big VCs like Alameda Reseach, Amonica, CMS, AppWork,…

So, you can completely believe that Blocto will be a big factor in the Flow ecosystem in the near future.

You can experience Bloctoswap right here: https://swap.blocto.app/#/swap

Blocktoswap

Lending

Flow has the following pieces in the Lending array:

• Flowty – a project P2P lending platform on Flow for NFTs (projects that have not launched products) experience here.
• NFTfi – a lending project on Flow that allows users to mortgage NFTs like collectibles in the famous NFT collection (NBA Topshots,…) to borrow other assets (Not yet running on Flow), experience here .

As you can see, because it is an NFT-oriented ecosystem, projects are mainly for users to mortgage with highly liquid NFTs or P2P lending. These applications are very effective in bringing utility and liquidity to NFTs.

However, no project has been put into operation yet, so it is not possible to monitor the parameters or operation status of the projects.

Please join us in waiting for the launch of these applications in the future.

Stablecoin

Stablecoins are an extremely important part of all ecosystems, including NFT-oriented ones like Flow, because users always want to transact with tokens of constant value to store value.

Flow currently has the following stablecoins:

• USDT – The USDT token is bridged from Ethereum via Flow, becoming tUSDT. This bridge is released by Bloctoswap.
• FUSD – Stablecoin on Flow issued by Prime Trust.
• USDC, BUSD will be used on this ecosystem in the near future.

The stablecoins on the Flow system are not yet in large quantity. The marketcap of these tokens on the Flow system is still very low, perhaps because there are not many Dapps using these stablecoin tokens as a means of payment.

The infrastructure

Flow is having the following pieces in the explorer and dashboard arrays in the ecosystem:

• Flowverse: The dashboard is relatively complete about the pieces of the Flow system, along with the situation of each project (mainnet or testnet or nothing).
• Flowscan: Block Explorer of the Flow ecosystem.
• Big Dipper: Explorer for smart contracts, tokens on Flow, works across multiple ecosystems.
• Add More Funds: The project makes tools to support players to calculate results and income when playing games.
• CryptoSlam: Dashboard track volume of NFT projects.

Tools and dashboards around the game NBA Topshot include:

• Flowmarketcap; Evaluate.market; LiveToken; MomentRanks; The First Mint; Rayvin; Rookshot.Market; TopShoters; Topshot Explorer;…

In general, the tools and explorers on the ecosystem have met the basic requirements.

The tools around the game NBA Topshot – the main card of the current ecosystem – are also many, with various functions.

In the field of Wallet, the ecosystem has the following supporting projects:

• Dapper: DapperLabs develops its own wallet to interact with Dapp in the ecosystem;
• Ledger, Math Wallet, Finoa Wallet: Wallets used to store tokens and interact with Dapps in the ecosystem;
• Talken (not yet active on Flow): Wallet that allows storing NFTs on many different ecosystems;
• Blocto: The Blocto wallet works on the Flow ecosystem.

With a wallet that supports a large ecosystem, including a native wallet developed by Dapper Labs, I see that the ecosystem has all the pieces in the Wallet array to develop the ecosystem.

Personally, I feel that using Blocto wallet on Blocto’s DEX and using Dapper Wallet has a relatively good UI/UX.

In terms of Oracle, the Flow blockchain used Chainlink as one of the oracle solutions for the platform.

This will help track price data and provide data to serve the development of the platform more sustainably and reliably, because Chainlink is a top market oracle, already has over 800 customers – children impressive number far ahead of competitors in the same industry.

Next, the existing bridges to the Flow ecosystem have only one bridge developed by Blocto, allowing to bring USDT tokens from Ethereum to Flow.

In the future, more tokens like BUSD, USDC will be supported, but I don’t know if there is a bridge from an ecosystem that is less expensive than Ethereum like BSC, Polygon, Solana,…?

If so, will the ecosystem have an easier and more abundant source of money? Let’s follow along with idolmeta.net!

NFT Marketplace

In the Flow ecosystem, the NFT Marketplace plays a very important role, because this ecosystem focuses on the development of NFTs and collectibles.

The Flow ecosystem currently has 28 NFT Marketplace projects, with 12 projects already in operation, 16 projects still at the testnet stage or not yet released.

Among them, the prominent NFT Market exchanges include:

• BloctoBay: As I said, this is a project that includes the NFT Market protocol, invested by many large investment funds. Therefore, this will likely be an influential factor in the Flow ecosystem.

BloctoBay has the same operating mechanism as Opensea – the largest NFT exchange in the market today.

With 8 million dollars raised from many funds (information announced on May 21, 2021), BloctoBay is currently in Beta and has not launched an official product.

In addition, Blocto is also the 3rd largest staker of the Flow ecosystem (with nearly 2 million FLOW stakes), and the most delegated validator, with 10,649/12,712 delegators.

• OpenSea: The largest NFT exchange in the market right now – there are plans to bring the project to Flow.
• Rarible: Another big NFT market, also announced they will bring the project to Flow in the near future.
• RCRDSHP: An NFT Market for music, invested $5 million by multiple funds including Dapper Labs.
• NBA Topshot: NFT Market of the hit NBA Topshot game.

In addition, other NFT Market exchanges are not gaining much popularity, do not have a large number of users or backers to promote growth in terms of users or revenue.

Game & Collectibles

In the Flow ecosystem, there are many pieces in the game & collectibles array. Typical faces in the ecosystem can be mentioned as:

• NBA Topshot (active): The NFT Collectibles project stormed the market in the first half of 2021.
• Dark Country (active): The NFT project has a relatively large number of users on Flow.
• UFC Collectibles (unreleased): Combining UFC with Flow to launch collectibles on the platform;
• NFL x Dapper Labs (unreleased).
• LaLiga (unreleased).

In the ecosystem, NBA Topshot is the leading application in the system, with a large number of participants and a huge transaction volume.

The marketcap of in-game collectibles has reached $915 million (according to MomentRanks).

In my opinion, NBA Topshot is the one who brings users to the whole ecosystem, then the developing applications in the system will develop to retain users.

As you can see, the Flow ecosystem is an ecosystem that focuses on NFTs and Collectibles, so it has a relatively strange structure.

Specifically, the AMM DEX on the system only has the effect of bootstrapping the liquidity of the tokens used for payment transactions in the system such as stablecoins, platform coins, …

Lending applications are also geared towards using NFTs as collateral.

The ecosystem is mainly focused on NFTs and Collectibles, so the platform leaders are definitely game projects or NFT Marketplaces.

However, the NFT Marketplace segment is quite empty, with no completed mainnet product that really attracts the attention of users.

Projection on the Flow ecosystem

Because it is an NFT-oriented ecosystem, NFT innovations will inevitably appear on this ecosystem.

If those products succeed on Ethereum, there’s no reason why projects with similar products can’t succeed on Flow.

You can pay attention and find opportunities in the following segments of the NFT market:

• NFT Fractionalization: Protocols that allow the original NFT to be broken down into pieces, to increase liquidity and meet the growing demand for ownership of the market.
• NFT Liquidity Pools: The purpose of NFT Liquidity Pools is quite similar to NFT Fractionalization, but instead of depositing just one NFT, you can deposit multiple NFTs into the Vault.

The Redeem mechanism of these platforms is also a bit more complicated than that of NFT Fractionalization.

Epilogue

Flow is currently trading on exchanges: Binance, Kucoin, Houbi. GATE, 

Hopefully, through the above article, you have had a better overview of the Flow ecosystem, understand the situation of the arrays and start looking for investment opportunities on the Flow ecosystem with idolmeta.net