Foreword

Welcome to our first Blog post. Flare has been over two years in the making and we are delighted to have made it this far. We have a lot more to do to build it into the incredibly useful network we think it can be and one of those elements is to try to communicate clearly with our potential partners and users.

Our intentions for this blog are primarily to detail what Flare is, cover how we intend to deploy it, give useful examples of how it can be used and report any major technical developments that happen. We will also be putting news and business developments here.

Over the course of the next couple of months we intend to regularly update this blog with material that sheds further light on why Flare is different, why we think it presents a radical opportunity to further blockchain and why we have spent so much time building it. In addition to me you will be hearing from our CTO -  Sean Rowan, our Chief Scientist - Dr. Nairi Usher, our security engineer - Dr Artem Vorobiev and our head of BD - Mo Taysir. We hope that what we put here will be of interest and broaden the communities ideas on what can be achieved with distributed ledger technology.

Finally I am delighted to announce that XPRING, the investment arm of Ripple Labs, has just completed a strategic investment into Flare. The partnership and investment enables the company to further the development of Flare, and brings a wealth of resources and partners to enhance and extend the Flare, Xpring and XRP eco-systems. We look forward to working further with Xpring to serve their partner’s needs beyond payments.

In this blog I will cover at high level what Flare is, why we built it, mention some of our initial use cases and partners, go a little deeper on the consensus protocol and briefly introduce the token.

If you have ideas on how we can make Flare better, would like to use Flare in your use case or would like to apply to work at Flare please email us on: info@flare.network.

Happy reading!

- Hugo Philion, Co-founder, 5th November 2019.

Introducing Flare

Flare is a new blockchain network based on the Flare Consensus Protocol - the first Turing Complete Federated Byzantine Agreement protocol. Flare’s native token will be an algorithmically managed, pegged stablecoin, aiming to keep network usage costs predictable and providing a primary input for DeFi use cases.

Multiplier effects or why we have built Flare:

The seed drill, the steam locomotive, the internet and countless other successful inventions all have a single unifying feature; they vastly expand outputs for a given input. This is the multiplier effect and it is a model that any hopeful contender for a new product or technology must be capable of achieving.

There are many technical reasons why we chose to develop a protocol that leverages the properties of FBA and subsequent blog posts will focus on  breaking down those reasons and highlighting specific use cases. There is, however, a single overarching reason that has led our design thinking - FBA and by extension Flare does not rely on money or economic incentives to secure the network.

To our thinking if the objective is to create a platform that can genuinely host a meaningful percentage of global activity then current scaling technologies that use economic incentives are untenable. The cost of securing a chain whether by direct capital allocation (which could otherwise be invested elsewhere), through excessive energy usage or both for wide scale usage is unfeasible and regressive.

The beauty of building the first smart contract platform that uses FBA consensus is that it can break out of this unscalable economic model. We built Flare to be truly scalable and truly useful.

The Flare Network will have the following properties:

1) It is open, permissionless and Turing-complete.

2) Token ownership does not confer power over the network.

3) Safety does not rely on unscalable economic incentives.

4) Flare will have a single base unit-of-account that is algorithmically stable in value, generated in part by burning XRP.

5) The network adopts the XRP encryption and address schemes so that both XRP and Flare can be used with a single key, providing a virtually seamless experience for XRP users.

Flare integrates the Ethereum Virtual Machine, has fair ordering, flexible trust and fast finality.

The White Paper can be found here: https://flare.network/app/uploads/2019/11/FCP.pdf

So Flare should be useful for businesses and entrepreneurs because it has stable pricing in a token that has low volatility. It’s safety doesn’t break down if your business grows large, if your security token represents billions of dollars of value or if the ramifications of failure of your system are unquantifiable. Importantly Flare provides an easy way for the users of the World’s 3rd largest and possibly most enterprise focussed chain - XRP Ledger - to do more complex and interesting things.

Initial Users & Partners

Whilst we have been in stealth mode for the past two years we have organically grown a set of initial users & Partners for Flare, listed below. We have many more network enhancing projects in the early stages of engaging with us and will announce these as they commit.

• Securitize, the security token issuance and life cycle management platform, who are using Flare to vastly expand the assets available to XRP users.
• Singularity a new platform for managing on chain and off chain financial assets and identity.
• BuenoBit who are building a remittance network for Latin America through industry consolidation.
• Neuhanse Network who build blockchain infrastructure for e-governance networks.
• Custody Digital Group, a secure custodial platform.
• An in Stealth regulated security token exchange.

About the Stable Token

Flare will shortly be releasing a draft token whitepaper detailing the construction and decentralized management of the native stablecoin. This draft whitepaper will then form the basis for further internal research and external consultation with partners, validators, the crypto community and external experts. Current expectations are that the stable coin will be pegged to the US dollar and allow for creation in part by burning XRP.

The core incentive mechanism for operating infrastructure on the Flare Network is a fiscal reward that accrues from providing accurate oracle signals that are used in stabilizing the price of the network’s native algorithmic stable coin. This prevents a tragedy of the commons scenario in the network’s infrastructure while also mitigating the regressive scenario where those with the most money control the network.

Sign-off:

We have been working for over two years with the single aim to build a platform that can enable a mass shift to decentralized systems and the new avenues of possibility that such a move can open up for the World. We believe that when we launch Flare, which isn’t bounded by economic incentives, with a low volatility native token that keeps usage costs stable, then we will have made a good first step in that direction.

We have many more steps to take and we hope you will follow us on that path and maybe even consider using Flare for your own use case.