Flare was founded by Hugo Philion, Sean Rowan and Dr Nairi Usher, now CEO, CTO and Chief Scientist, respectively. They met while studying machine learning at University College London, sharing an interest in distributed systems and their potential applications.

Genesis of Flare mainnet occurred on 14 July 2022, followed by the public token distribution event (TDE) on 9 January 2023. Total available supply at genesis was 100 billion FLR, of which 12 billion FLR were in circulation immediately after TDE. The public token distribution continues for 36 monthly installments providing a total of 28,524,921,372 FLR to the community. Flare is an inflationary network with 10% of circulating supply minted in year 1. These freshly minted FLR are provided to Flare Time Series Oracle data providers and the token holders that delegate to them (70%) to secure the decentralized provision of price data to the network, validators (20%) and State Connector attestation providers (10%).

FLR is the native token used for payments, transaction fees to prevent spam attacks and staking in validator nodes. FLR can also be wrapped into an ERC-20 variant, WFLR. WFLR tokens serve various functions; they can be delegated to FTSO data providers, for example, or used to participate in governance. These two uses are not mutually exclusive and do not prevent the tokens from being used in other EVM-compatible dapps and smart contracts on Flare. Wrapped FLR (WFLR) can be minted by depositing native FLR tokens into a smart contract and withdrawing the newly minted WFLR.

Flare has developed two native interoperability protocols facilitating on-chain, decentralized acquisition of blockchain, time series and Web2 API data. The protocols are secured by the network itself, with decentralized, independent data providers incentivized to deliver accurate data. This helps Flare to minimize risks for users and developers. The State Connector securely acquires event information from other blockchains and the internet to be used in smart contracts on Flare. It acquires this data securely, scalably and in a decentralized manner, with a set of independent attestation providers needing to reach consensus on the validity of an event before the information can be made available to dapps on the network. The Flare Time Series Oracle (FTSO) utilizes the network structure to deliver highly decentralized prices and data series to dapps on Flare without relying on centralized data providers. By providing reliable access to cryptocurrency prices, detailed transaction information from other chains, and Web2 event data, Flare enables developers to build applications that can provide more utility to a larger group of users.

Flare is an EVM-based layer 1 aiming to make blockchain more useful by giving developers decentralized access to high-integrity data from other chains and the internet. This enables new use cases and monetization models, while allowing dapps to serve multiple chains through a single deployment.