Flow is a layer one blockchain designed from the ground up as a platform for next-gen apps, games, and the digital assets that power them.

Scaling without sharding, while maintaining composability and decentralization

Flow has pioneered a new paradigm of multi-role architecture that solves the core scaling problems of today’s blockchains without sharding.

Multi-role architecture is a horizontally scalable network that solves the common scalability & security issues with a protocol-native data availability stack, proposer builder separation, separation of compute, consensus & settlement – all without sharding. A permissionless network with separation of concerns orchestrated by a holistic protocol opens the door to massive scale for novel composable applications.

In Flow, the mempool for incoming transactions is horizontally distributed across independent clusters of specialized validators [Collectors]. Thereby, the number of transactions the Flow network can ingest is by orders of magnitude higher than the load any individual validator could handle. This solves the foundational hurdle of monolithic blockchains where the overall system's capacity is capped by the number of transactions an individual validator can handle (typically the 33-percentile of the slowest validators).

Unlike other blockchains where validators are incentivized for preferential treatment of certain transactions to the disadvantage of the average user (commonly referred to as miner-extractable value [MEV]), Flow natively provides censorship & MEV resistance which is achieved by designating specific validators for building transaction bundles that are separated from the validators proposing blocks (Consensus nodes).

With designated validators for transaction execution, Flow horizontally scales natively within the layer-1 protocol. Other chains commonly work around the fundamental scaling limitations of their layer-1 protocol by outsourcing scalability to a fragmented ecosystem of L2s - rollups, side chains, state channels, etc. Flow’s scaling without sharding approach provides superior developer experience, improves composability and interoperability of the entire ecosystem.

Standard blockchains bundle consensus and execution while Flow decouples them. Separation of concerns significantly reduces redundant effort which will allow Flow to scale to thousands of times higher throughput and petabytes of state data at lower cost while maintaining a shared execution environment for all operations on the network. This enables better composability and sovereignty for applications built on Flow.