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Course Overview

1. Basic Concepts

1.1 Learning Blockchain Concepts 1.2 The Flow Blockchain & Cadence

2. Learning Web Development

2.1 Creating our DApp 2.2 Learning Frontend Code 2.3 Adding Javascript Code 2.4 Finishing the Skeleton

3. Cadence Development

3.1 Our First Smart Contract 3.2 Transactions and Scripts 3.3 Bringing Cadence to our DApp & Deploying our Contract

4. Learn FCL

4.1 Connecting the Blockchain 4.2 Running a Script 4.3 Passing in Arguments to a Script 4.4 Finishing the Skeleton

5. Finish & Deploy

5.1 Finishing our DApp 5.2 Deploying our DApp
Course Overview
Catalog Course Beginner Dapp

Chapter 1 Lesson 2 - The Flow Blockchain & Cadence

Yo yo yo! It’s meeeeee! Jacob here. Hello. Now that we learned what the Blockchain is, Lesson 2 will cover why we have decided to learn the Flow Blockchain and how it compares to other Blockchains out there. After all, if you’re going to spend hours creating a DApp on Flow, let’s figure out why we’re doing it in the first place.

The Flow Blockchain

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The Flow Blockchain is the best. Boom! I said it.

Little History Lesson

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The Flow Blockchain is relatively new. I would say it did not become well known until the Summer of 2020 when the Flow team started to show it to the world and people became interested. Dapper Labs, the company that owns Flow, had originally created the famous CryptoKitties DApp which grew to insane levels of popularity during previous years. In fact, I would argue CryptoKitties was one of the first “blockchainy” things that the world actually adopted, which was a huge deal for the industry.

After Dapper Labs had immense success with CryptoKitties, which was on Ethereum, they also began to see some issues with both Ethereum and Solidity, which is the Smart Contract programming language for many Blockchains on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Thus, Cadence was born.

Facts about Flow

  • It is much, much, MUCH cheaper than Ethereum to do stuff on. As an example, on Ethereum, if you are to try and change the data on the Blockchain through a transaction (explained in lesson 1), it could cost on average around 80$ from personal experience. However, on Flow, they didn’t even have transaction costs until around October 2021, and now, transactions cost fractions of a cent. Thus, Flow is much more approachable to build production-level DApps on for the average user.
  • It is very new, so there are still tons of things being improved upon. This means there are bound to be bugs here and there, but we will work through them together. This also means that it is the perfect opportunity to learn Flow and Cadence now.
  • There are barely any learning resources to get started on Flow. Hence, this course.
  • There have been many successful DApps on Flow, including NBATopShot, which was (and still is) a massive success.

Cadence

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Cadence is the Smart Contract programming language for the Flow Blockchain. That is, the code you will be writing to make Smart Contracts in this course will be in Cadence.

We will be writing Cadence code throughout this bootcamp since we are making our DApp on the Flow blockchain. However, because this is not a beginner cadence bootcamp, I will not be diving into the realm and wonders of Cadence…

If you would like to get a better understanding of Cadence, I strongly encourage you to check out our Beginner Cadence Course. It’s really good.

Conclusion

That about wraps things up for today! In the next lesson, we will start by creating our first DApp.

Quests

There are no quests for today. But don’t think we’re taking it easy on ya. Get ready for the next chapter ;)

Learning Blockchain Concepts

Creating our DApp