T‍he Flow Blockchain aims to be a developer-friendly blockchain for a new generation of DApps and digital assets that power them. Flow Blockchain is based on a unique, multi-role architecture, and is designed to scale without sharding, so that it can accommodate consumer applications with more users. The project was created by Dapper Labs, which previously created Crypto Kitties, one of the most popular blockchain collectible projects. Flow is now being used by NBA Top Shot, an officially licensed NBA platform for player related, blockchan-based collectibles. The founders: Roham Gharegozlou, Dieter Shirley, and Mikhael Naayem launched Flow with the goal of simplifying the DApp development experience.
Flow uses a Proof of Stake consensus mechanism. Flow coins are intended to be used as payment for validation services, data and computation, governance, as well as for collateral for secondary tokens that may be created on the platform in the future.

The Interplanetary File System (IPFS) is a decentralized network protocol for sharing hypermedia in a distributed file system. IPFS can be used to link blockchain transactions This effectively timestamps and secures the content, without having to put the data on the chain itself. Filecoin, an IPFS-based decentralized storage cloud, is closely related with the IPFS protocol, and provides the incentive system.