The Focus Group is Born

**This post serves as the introductory post to The Focus Group’s Medium account. You can view the original announcement about The Focus Group here**

Welcome to The Focus Group! We’re a self-organized group of FLOW protocol token holders who pulled together to support the project and community.

What’s FLOW? The official website (linked back there ←) describes it as a self-distributing store of value. It’s a currency, designed in part for the burgeoning DeFi industry, that has significant inflation but distributes it proportionately and transactionlessly to *all holders*.

Usually high inflation is cause for concern in a currency, fiat or digital. But it’s also important for liquidity and to help achieve broad distribution. The problem is that inflation is almost always distributed to privileged stakeholders, while everyone else gets diluted (read: our holdings become less valuable over time). It’s called The Cantillon Effect, and FLOW decided to throw it out the window and instead spread inflation out to all holders.

This creates some interesting monetary policy. Instead of a central bank creating trillions of dollars in new supply (money printer go brrr) and giving it to retail banks to distribute, FLOW gives it to all of us and *we* get to decide where it goes.

Keep it. Sell it. Donate it. It’s up to us! And no one ever gets diluted in the process (read: as long as you’re holding FLOW your holdings will never be worth less purely because of increased supply from inflation. *of course many other factors can cause the marketcap, and thus, holdings to fluctuate in value, both up and down).

How’s that for decentralization?!

It’s a powerful idea, and we believe it’s an important step in the financial paradigm shift Bitcoin started almost 12 years ago.

And just like Bitcoin, FLOW was created by an anonymous developer. In this case, Morpheus. But there’s a challenge in crypto these days. Token holders tend to look to a founder or team to do all the work, hoping they can sit back and grow rich posting memes.

That’s not what FLOW is all about.

Flow has always been intended as a community-owned, community-led project. But the first few weeks looked a lot like many of the aforementioned projects. A little hype from the kids over on /biz/ and a brief moon of the coin followed by an exit by the /biz/ magpies looking for the next shiny thing. But underneath that brief pump was a diamond in the rough, an important financial instrument and strong foundation of holders with a willingness to stick out a market downturn and put in the work to see FLOW shine.

Seeing the potential, The Focus group came together to take it to the next level.

We decided to act as a sort of informal “core” group to steward initiatives and push the ecosystem forward. We’ve seen the initiatives put forward by the community, both in Discord and the Telegram channel, and have started actively putting them in motion.

Here’s the roadmap we put together so far:

We’ll be bringing these initiatives, along with new ones as they arise, to TG and Discord frequently for feedback and broader community participation.

[Note: The 3rd party code audit by top firm Red4Sec is now underway!]

The Focus Group initiatives are meant to boost trust and credibility for FLOW. Everyone in the community is encouraged to take on this kind of initiative! The Focus Group has no formal power. We’re giving our time and energy because we believe in the promise of FLOW, and we hope many of you will do the same.

There’s much to do in the coming months but we’re excited to make it happen with all of you.

So make proposals, offer feedback, volunteer your time and skills, form a working group — add value! We’d especially love to see more solidity developers, social media marketers, a brand professional, and more join the community.

Together we’re building FLOW into a strong, trusted player in DeFi.

And we’re just getting flowing. ;)