Unlocking New Possibilities for Developers with Flow’s Crescendo Upgrade‍

Flow, a blockchain designed to empower developers to create unparalleled digital consumer experiences, has recently rolled out its most significant upgrade since its inception — Crescendo. This update represents a major milestone, not just for Flow, but for the broader crypto ecosystem, bringing with it a host of new possibilities for developers. At SimpleHash, we are excited to announce our partnership with the Flow Foundation, making Crescendo’s features accessible through our platform, as part of our core set of APIs to access multi-chain token and NFT data.

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What Crescendo Actually Does

Crescendo introduces EVM equivalence to Flow. In plain terms, this means you can now run Ethereum-compatible smart contracts on Flow without any modifications. If you’re already familiar with Solidity, the programming language for Ethereum, you won’t need to learn anything new. This upgrade allows you to deploy Ethereum-based contracts and protocols directly on Flow. If you’ve got existing Solidity code, it should work out of the box on Flow.

The compatibility doesn’t stop with code, either. Tokens on Flow, including those created with Flow’s own Cadence language, will now be ERC-20 compatible. This could simplify integrating your projects across different chains, and make it faster to start building rich, consumer-focused applications on Flow.

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Why It Matters

For developers, Crescendo’s EVM equivalence means less work when deploying across multiple blockchains. If you’ve been working within the Ethereum ecosystem, you already know the tools and libraries. Now, you can leverage those on Flow, tapping into its architecture without dealing with a new learning curve.

More importantly, Flow has its own advantages, like protocol-level account abstraction, mobile secure elements, and MEV protection. These features could make certain use-cases, like managing user accounts and enhancing mobile security, simpler. The important part is you don’t have to choose between using familiar EVM infrastructure / interfaces and Flow’s powerful capabilities — you can have both.

Another thing worth noting: Crescendo includes guaranteed backward compatibility for Cadence, Flow’s smart contract language. This means once you deploy something in Cadence, you can count on it working in the future, even after Flow sees new updates. This is crucial for long-term projects, particularly in DeFi, where immutability and stability are non-negotiable.

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What’s in It for Crypto Developers

For a lot of developers, blockchain work often means juggling different environments and dealing with their quirks. Crescendo cuts down on some of that hassle. You can take code you’ve already written for an EVM based chain, drop it into Flow, and it should just work. It also means you can take advantage of Flow’s unique features without abandoning the tools and languages you’re used to.

At SimpleHash, we’re integrating these new capabilities into our platform, so you can access Crescendo’s features through our APIs. Whether you’re pulling token data, managing NFTs, or developing complex use cases with digital assets, the idea is to streamline the process so you can focus on building, not on fighting compatibility issues.

Crescendo is a technical upgrade that does what it says on the tin: it makes Flow more versatile without adding unnecessary complexity. If you’re a crypto developer and want to work across multiple environments, this update is worth your attention. No noise, just functionality that lets you get the job done more efficiently.

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New Use Cases with Crescendo on SimpleHash

SimpleHash already supports the Flow Crescendo testnet, and will be supporting mainnet upon launch. Using SimpleHash's APIs, developers can build a number of important crypto use cases right out of the box. Here's a few examples:
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• Gathering all assets in a user's wallet — with EVM equivalence, SimpleHash supports querying the real-time balance of both Fungible tokens and NFTs in any Flow wallet, along with the full metadata. Both the Fungible Balances and NFTs by Wallet endpoint make this simple.
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• Setting up watch-lists for EVM-compatible wallets, specifically for use cases that need to be tracking the movements of assets in and out of specific wallets (e.g., push notification systems). Using the SimpleHash webhook event types developers can achieve this precise tracking of all transfers and updates, now including on Flow Crescendo
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• Building a real-time event system with Kafka - for use cases (e.g., trading applications) that require the full throughput of a chain, and low latency, the Kafka Streaming Service can provide a topic of all ongoing mint and transfer activity on Flow, with minimal configuration and setup.

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Excited about Flow, and the Crescendo upgrade? Have a specific use case, requirement, or feature request in mind? We'd love to hear from you — reach out to our team to set up time to discuss.
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About SimpleHash

SimpleHash provides real-time access to metadata, media, sales, floor prices, listings, bids, collections and more across 60+ chains. We make it easy to build experiences that users love. We've partnered with some of the leading players in crypto — please reach out if you'd like to learn more.