The other side's argument
I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything that I don’t know the other side’s argument better than they do. - Charlie Munger
Two things happened this week that provoked this post today:
Nanobash (small app developer) published this article explaining why they left Flow for our competitor
I read this article inspired by Munger’s quote above titled “The Work Required to Have an Opinion”
So, lets dive in to understand their arguments.
Nanobash wrote:
Issues we encountered with FLOW
The blockchain is “private” this means in order to deploy a contract we have to manually be in contact with the FLOW team (and they are VERY slow to respond)
The blockchain has constant downtime for “upgrades”
There are no widely adopted non-custodial wallets which is unacceptable for true NFT ownership
There is no equivalent standard for ERC-1155 tokens which means even if a wallet was developed it wouldn’t be able to support Nanobash NFTs
There are constant changes to the software behind FLOW which are not backward compatible and cause breaking issues
It’s extremely difficult to acquire FLOW token for users in certain countries which makes withdrawing / depositing NFTs from Nanobash problematic
Other popular NFT platforms like Opensea do not currently support FLOW
… Ultimately we decided that being locked into the FLOW ecosystem would be too harmful in the long run which is the reason we decided to take the time to migrate away.
This is all good feedback. Unfortunately for them, the last sentence is where they have things backwards. They are the ones who are thinking short-term. It’s a shame because those 7 issues they mentioned have mostly been resolved in just the past month. Here’s how I would respond to them:
I understand that if they have short-term timelines and milestones to hit, then another chain else may be compelling for them. If they were thinking long-term, they may have seen the progress along all these dimensions and stuck around.
To really lay it out there, here are other reasons if I was building an app today, why I may choose somewhere not Flow:
If building a Defi app, there’s very limited DeFi infrastructure, tools and liquidity pools
If building a DAO, there’s very limited infrastructure and tools
Flow has a newer dev community with less examples of success than on Ethereum
You need Flow smart contract developers for which there is very limited supply
You can bet all those things will be changing soon too.
Over and out.
Brian