Less than 6 months from now,
@flow_blockchain will deliver its most significant technical upgrade since launch in 2020:
Crescendo ๐
Hereโs my understanding of what is happening and why it matters to Web 3 developers in all ecosystems
I believe Crescendo addresses the two biggest opportunities to improve developer experience on Flow:
โก Liquidity and DeFi โย Crescendo enables a massive improvement in liquidity infrastructure on Flow including on- and off-ramps as well as a native DeFi ecosystem that serves as a liquidity backbone for the entire network.
โก Developer Experience โ Flow will become as easy to deploy on as any Layer 2 chain, while maintaining 100% of the capabilities and benefits of its Layer 1 architecture as well as the ability to seamlessly compose with Cadence on top of EVM.
These technical upgrades are happening at the same time as a rich roadmap of content releases, application launches, and platform improvements driven by the Flow community. This includes on-chain games, social networks, and new collectibles platforms as well as the aforementioned DeFi core ecosystem.
Flow already has among the most authentic and vibrant communities โ addressing the core liquidity and tooling issues will create massive momentum behind the entire ecosystem, allowing Flow to take its rightful place as the leading network for consumer applications and smart contracts with the most powerful on-chain logic. ๐
Included in Crescendo
โ Cadence 1.0: A major upgrade of the Cadence programming language which enables fully immutable smart contracts on Flow. If you're a developer
#onFlow, make sure you're ready for this breaking change.
โ Full EVM equivalence: Allowing Flow to host EVM-based smart contracts, platforms, tooling, and utilities natively and fully composable with the Cadence environments.
โย Performance improvement: Core protocol is getting significant upgrades, e.g. Atree register inlining increases state storage efficiency by nearly 2x.
โ Performance improvement: Additionally, execution state data (accounts, events, etc.) is now propagated to the edge nodes allowing them to locally serve execution data. Crescendo also enables script execution on the edge nodes, removing rate limits on script execution on private edge nodes and improving network availability by alleviating the resource usage on execution nodes.
Timeline
๐ฃ Initial developer release on dedicated Crescendo test network by end-Feb / early March;
๐ฆ Flow testnet within 90-120 days of above;
๐ฆ
Flow mainnet within 2-4 weeks of testnet.
Flow Town Hall
I joined the Flow Town Hall today to talk in-depth about all of this โย and much more including Fast Break, the latest NBA experience from Dapper Labs โ stay tuned to
@flow_blockchain for the recording if you missed it !