Introduction:

What is Flow blockchain:

Flow is a blockchain platform that originally was designed for gaming purposes, but has expanded since its launch in 2020. The flow blockchain enables fast, low-cost transactions and supports smart contracts. It powers blockchain applications including NBA Top Shot, a non-fungible token (NFT) offering. Flow also has a native cryptocurrency that trades under the symbol FLOW.

What Does Permissionless Mean:

Permissionless is a blockchain-specific term that means that users do not require permission to use a blockchain protocol, DeFi platform, or related system.

What is Decentralization in Blockchain:

Whenever a new transaction takes place in a certain blockchain, say bitcoin’s chain, it does not directly become a block that can be added to the blockchain. It first, needs to be verified.

Who does this verification? It is government? The RBI? Or a whole other governing body?

It is a decentralized network of computers. This ensures that the control and decision-making are not in one individual or group’s hand but is evenly distributed in a network to eliminate the chance of bias or misjudgment.

This network is connected via scattered ‘nodes’ that verify the authenticity of a new block, before adding it to the chain. It makes blockchain one step more secure for users. In order for a person to tamper with the blockchain, they would have to tamper with all the blocks of the chain and hack every node, which is next to impossible.

The transactions in blockchain are highly encrypted, thanks to decentralization. Read more.

How does Flow work?

Every blockchain has its own validation mechanism to process transactions and secure the network.

For example, the Ethereum blockchain’s Proof-of-Stake (PoS) allows for a decentralized and secure network. However, it has run into difficulties scaling and processing such large quantities of transactions while keeping costs down. This has led to the rise of layer 2 solutions that can handle many orders off-chain at faster speeds and lower transaction fees than the mainnet.

Flow, on the other hand, splits the work of processing transactions into four separate nodes that each have their own role and responsibility. Instead of relying on off-chain solutions to scale the network, Flow’s native node subdivisions give it a great advantage in blockchain scalability. Read more.

Methodology:

In this dashboard we want to find out is releasing permissionless contract deployment and new nodes for staking, moving Flow blockchain toward

decentralization by analysing staking Flow.

For this purpose and to find other metrics I used following date:

Used table:

• flow.core.ez_staking_actions

We can see there 3 types of action in this table:

• Stake: TokensCommitted, DelegatorTokensCommitted

• Unstake: DelegatorUnstakedTokensWithdrawn,UnstakedTokensWithdrawn

• Claim Reward: RewardTokensWithdrawn, DelegatorRewardTokensWithdrawn

Circulating supply considered 1,036,200,000 FLOW according to CMC data.

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Part 1:

Observations:

• 581K transactions performed so far including stake, ustake and claim reward actions.
• 37.9K unique wallets staked $Flow so far.
• 30.8M $FLow distributed amongst stakers as rewards.
• 1.95B flow staked so far which 1.254B of it ustaked over time so there is 0.699B $Flow are currently staked.
• 0.699B $Flow are currently staked and With considering 1.036B $Flow as circulatting supply, we can see that stake/ circulating supply ratio is %67.5.

Observations:

• Above charts shows staking action is leading in all parameters including unique users, transactions and voluume.
• Although more unique users performed unstaking actions but we can see claiming rewards transactins are much higher than unstaking transactions.
• Majority of stakers are users who staking less than 10 $Flow(%87.5).

Part 2:

Part 3:

*Observations:

On the above charts, we can see in the majority of days, the number and also volume of stakes is more than unstakes and its share is even increasing more and more as time goes on. (especially in number of actions)

March - September was the highest peak of number of delegation activity and also number of active delegators on FLOW.

But, the highest volume of stakes achieved on December 2020 and March 2021 with more than 600M staked FLOW and the highest unstake volume has achieved on February 2021 with 637M unstaked FLOW.(the volume charts are logarithmic)

Morever we can see the highest number of nodes were active during January till April 2021 but after that there was a decreasing number of Nodes till October 2021, But after October, we can again see the increasing trend of active nodes which shows the increasing decentralization of the Flow blockchain.

*Credit for Ali3N#8546 dashboard.

Part 4:

Observations:

• 0xe72ce32df935b2b4 and 0x0aabe4cf576e08ee are users with most staked amount (315M).
• 0x034b5af0e8cfb26b and 0x1cff81fcce6a028f are users with most staked amount (312.5M).
• 0x5dc3fc329730c066 has managed to caim to most rewards so far (6.5M).

Conclusion:

In total we can say seeing increase in weekly unique users, staking transactions and active operating nodes shows that Flow blockchain are moving toward to be more decenteralized.

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