Flow is a fast, decentralized, and developer-friendly blockchain, designed as the foundation for a new generation of games, apps, and the digital assets that power them. It is based on a unique, multi-role architecture, and designed to scale without sharding, allowing for massive improvements in speed and throughput while preserving a developer-friendly, ACID-compliant environment.
From manufacturing to CPU design, pipelining is a common technique for dramatically scaling up productivity. Flow applies pipelining to blockchains by separating the jobs of a validator node into four different roles: Collection, Consensus, Execution, and Verification. This separation of labor between nodes is vertical (across the different validation stages for each transaction) rather than horizontal (across different transactions, as with sharding).
In other words, every validator node still participates in the validation of every transaction, but they do so only at one of the stages of validation. They can therefore specialize for — and greatly increase the efficiency of — their particular stage of focus.
Flow utilizes Cadence, the first ergonomic, resource-oriented smart contract programming language.
Resource-oriented programming is a new paradigm, designed to be secure and easy-to-use. For the first time, developers can create uniquely durable digital artifacts where ownership is tracked by the language itself, enabling a powerful new category of applications where assets are stored directly in the account or object that owns them and can be moved around as objects instead of entries in a centralized ledger.