So, if you remember back a year or two (or more?)... Ripple (XRP) holders were asked to make a quick memo on their public facing accounts (via XUMM or otherwise) to attach a Ethereum address in preparation for a Flare airdrop sometime in the distant future.

Ripple (XRP) is a blockchain that helps settle trades through chains of trades or by using the native bridging currency, XRP. At the time, it was an interesting way to try and remove friction between trades that would otherwise be difficult or impossible due to lack of liquidity. However, the concept started to get blind-sided by DeFi based on smart contracts.

So, introduce Flare (FLR), which aims to solve one of the problems that currently affects DeFi and assets that are NOT natively on Turing-complete (smart contract) blockchains. The problem for assets like Litecoin, Bitcoin and other non-smart contract tokens/coins is the fact that they need to use a TRUSTED wrapping/bridge to bring them over into a smart-contract platform to be able to use them in DeFi.... or in the case of real world assets, synthetics are generally to be used as a proxy.

As you can see above, the initial assets supported at launch is a bit limited, but the potential is there for for others like Bitcoin. Like many things in this space, only time will tell what will succeed or not... and there are projects that promise the moon, and fall significantly short... and there are others that make more modest but realistic promises that might be able to build up and out from there. Hype or substance? It is always a bit hard to differentiate between the two!

In the style of Polkadot (DOT) and its canary testnet Kusama (KSM), Flare has its own canary testnet, Songbird with its own token SGB. It is an interesting choice, other networks like Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain have opted for testnets with tokens of no market value that can be easily obtained from faucets. Kusama (KSM) has proven to be a network and a token with its own intrinsic value as platforms build out working products on the network... although, I do wonder what Kusama will be worth when Polkadot rolls out properly.

Songbird went live not so long ago (in the last few days, or week?)... and the Songbird (SBG) tokens have now been distributed to the holders of XRP that completed the steps for Flare registration. At the moment, there is limited utility... and a public block explorer only just went live. So, you can check up your own addresses (the Ethereum address format that you used for Flare registration) to see if you have received your SGB tokens. Hopefully you have, as that will probably be a good indicator that you have done everything correctly and that you will be receiving the Flare drop as well when it comes online!

So... another platform to keep an eye on. Who knows what will happen. Just take care, SGB is NOT available for purchase on ANY platform at the moment. The network is not ready for that... it is in observation mode at the moment. So, avoid the scammers... just use the block-explorer to have a peek around, but there is nothing worth doing on the blockchain at the moment!

I can also be found cross-posting at:
Hive
Steem
Publish0x

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