What is blockchain?
A blockchain is a distributed ledger made up of increasing lists of entries that are safely kept together by cryptographic hashes. Each block has a timestamp, transaction data, and a cryptographic hash of the previous block. A blockchain is created when a series of blocks, each containing information about the one before it, are joined together to form a chain.
Why do we need blockchain?
The world in which we live is centralised and only a few people control everything. The power is not in the hands of common people and have to follow whatever one centralised entity says. Hence, blockchain helps solve this problem. Blockchain increases trust, security, transparency and the traceability of data and delivers cost savings with new efficiencies.
Advantages of blockchain
Decentralization
Security
Privacy
Speed
Immutability
These are some of the advantages of blockchain but it has countless more advantages too.
Introduction to Flare Network
Going by the tagline of Connect Everything, Flare is the blockchain for developers, providing them with secure decentralised access to high integrity data and from other chains and the internet.
Problem with blockchain
Accessing the data from the outside world is one of the shortcomings of the blockchain apart from its several advantages.
How to solve this problem?
Well, here is where Flare Netwok comes into the picture.
With Flare, you can unleash the full potential of blockchain by using Flare’s decentralized data acquisition protocols and scalable EVM-based smart contracts to expand the reach and value of your project. You can build on Flare with more data than ever before, or build with Flare to serve multiple ecosystems.
Advantages of using Flare
Bridging - Flare's core protocols enable creating safer bridges.
State acquisition - With Flare, you can build dapps that utilize state from any connected chain.
Web 2 connectivity - This is a major problem, but with the help of Flare you can trustlessly trigger Smart Contracts with data from several apps.
Decentralised data feeds
Scalable smart contracts
Deep Dive into Flare Network
Flare is the layer 1 blockchain like Ethereum but for data with data acquisition functionality. It is EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) based that means you don’t have to learn a new language to build on Flare other than solidity. The Dapp built in solidity to run on any other EVM chain can also be used in Flare. It solves the problem that the traditional blockchain faces where it cannot interact with the outside world without the help of oracles. Flare offers developers decentralised access to high integrity data from other chains and the internet. This allows dapps to not be limited to a single chain but can be served on multiple chains with single deployment.
You may think this is just a small use case, but ask web3 developers what big of a task this is :)
People’s thoughts on blockchain
People tend to think that blockchain is not relevant and this is the main issue that is restricting blockchain from reaching to larger audience. But, Flare comes to the rescue here and helps people make dapps with secure access to data and foster new types of dapps.
Uniqueness of the Flare Network
Flare has two data acquisition protocols with whose help it is able to do this. They are as follows:
FTSO
State Connector
The FTSO delivers highly-decentralized time series data feeds to dapps on Flare.
The state connector enables Flare to safely and trustlessly come to consensus over an event that has taken place externally to the network, for example a blockchain transaction between two parties.
It is with the help of these two protocols that developers get decentralised access to high integrity data from other chains and the internet.
Deep dive into the two protocols
State Connector
Here’s a diagrammatic representation of the State Connector of the Flare Network
The state connector can be considered as a basic Request-Response model where you send a request to the server and the server replies back with a response but a slight change in the web3 field where everything is decentralised.
The connector enables the offchain data to be brought on-chain to be able to be used by the dapps. This data is immutable and cannot be changed.
Working of the State Connector
The user requests data from the connector and the connector behind the scenes makes a request to the attestation provider and when the attestation providers come to an agreement, it sends the data and then the data is made available on the network sending in the form a response to the user. This is done by only FLARE NETWORK and not any other oracle which is a big big deal.
It can be used to verify various transactions on chain.
Flare time series oracle
There are a lot of security issues in decentralisation too but the FTSO is a highly decentralised protocol for safely retrieving external time series data.
FTSO can be used to retrieve and supply digital asset prices to the users.
Working of the FTSO
The price pair data retrieval is done by various exchanges and then from the independent network of data providers, which are incentivised to deliver information accurately. Then, the price pair data is supplied to the FTSO to compute an estimate for every series and makes it available for any user.
More can be found on the Flare Network website - https://flare.network/
Thank you!