Validators process transactions and receive fees from users (supply-side fees).

Flow is a smart contract platform for decentralized applications (a blockchain). Flow was founded by Roham Gharegozlou, Dieter Shirley and Mikhael Naayem and launched in 2019.

FLOW holders own and govern the protocol. They currently don’t take a cut of the total transaction fees paid by users (revenue). Flow’s investors include a16z, Coatue, Coinfund, Fabric Ventures, etc.

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# Flow Number of validators Methodology

## 1. Overview

The number of validators metric tracks the daily count of active validators on the Flow blockchain. This metric measures network decentralization by counting validators (nodes) that maintain a positive stake amount. The calculation processes Flow staking contract events to track stake changes over time, maintaining a cumulative view of each validator's stake balance and counting only those with positive stakes as active validators.

## 2. Data sources

- **Flow staking events**: Parsed `TokensStaked` events from the Flow blockchain's `FlowIDTableStaking` contract, containing validator node IDs, staked amounts, and block timestamps
- **Flow unstaking events**: Parsed `TokensUnstaked` events from the same contract, indicating when validators reduce or remove their stake
- **Flow blockchain data**: Block timestamp information for temporal ordering and daily aggregation

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Staking events processing
- **Purpose**: Creates a unified view of all validator stake changes by combining staking and unstaking events
- **Logic**: Extracts `TokensStaked` events as positive stake changes and `TokensUnstaked` events as negative stake changes. Each event provides the `node_id` (validator identifier), `amount` (stake change converted to big numeric for precision), and `block_timestamp` for temporal ordering
- **Key fields**: `node_id` identifies the validator, `amount` represents the stake change (positive for staking, negative for unstaking), `block_timestamp` provides the exact timing

### Component B: Daily stake aggregation  
- **Purpose**: Aggregates all stake changes per validator per day to create daily net stake movements
- **Logic**: Groups staking events by day (using timestamp truncation to day boundaries) and by `node_id`, then sums all stake changes within each day. This handles multiple staking or unstaking events from the same validator on the same day
- **Key fields**: `timestamp` (truncated to day), `node_id`, `stake_change` (sum of all stake movements for that validator on that day)

### Component C: Cumulative stake calculation
- **Purpose**: Calculates each validator's total accumulated stake over time
- **Logic**: Uses a window function partitioned by `node_id` and ordered by `timestamp` to calculate running totals of stake changes. This creates a cumulative stake balance for each validator on each day they had staking activity
- **Key fields**: `cumulative_stake` (running total of all stake changes for each validator through each date)

### Component D: Date spine and stake forward-filling
- **Purpose**: Ensures complete daily coverage and forward-fills validator stake balances
- **Logic**: Creates a complete date range from the first staking activity to the current date, then cross-joins with all unique validator node IDs. For each day-validator combination, performs a lateral join to find the most recent stake balance for that validator on or before that date, effectively forward-filling stake balances for days without staking activity
- **Key fields**: Complete date coverage with `cumulative_stake` forward-filled for every validator on every day

### Component E: Active validator counting
- **Purpose**: Counts validators with positive stakes on each day
- **Logic**: Groups forward-filled data by date and counts distinct validators where `cumulative_stake` is greater than zero. Only validators with positive stakes are considered active validators contributing to network security
- **Key fields**: `number_of_validators` (count of validators with positive stake on each day)

### Final aggregation
- **Combining components**: The daily validator counts flow directly into the final metric standardization process
- **Time aggregation**: Data is aggregated to daily boundaries using timestamp truncation, with a complete date spine ensuring no gaps in the time series
- **Final calculation**: The final metric value represents the daily count of validators maintaining positive stake balances. Metric finalization applies standardized formatting and fills any remaining gaps with zero values using the 'fill_zeros' strategy
- **Chain filtering**: Chain availability filtering ensures the metric is only calculated for periods when Flow blockchain data is available and reliable

*This methodology was automatically generated by Token Terminal's methodology analyzer.*

Number of active validators securing the network.

FlowFLOW

Number of validators

Number of validators

Competitive landscape

Chain breakdown