Graphene (GFN) is a community-driven, next-generation modular cryptocurrency platform designed to be secure, flexible, and scalable while maintaining maximum decentralization. The Graphene network aims to support complex decentralized applications (Dapps) business models and allow the creation of customized shards that are advanced for various use cases. Sharding is the database partitioning that separates large databases into smaller sections called data shards.

The Graphene ecosystem was developed by the team behind the  Phore cryptocurrency project. The idea was to add smart-contract functionality to Phore by adding a smart contract smart-chain. However, the team chose to build a new blockchain featuring scalability, flexibility, security, and functionality, which was hard to achieve with the existing one. The new blockchain is capable of much more than just adding the smart contract features. Smart contracts are just like regular contracts; however, instead of being drafted on paper, these contracts run in the form of protocols on the blockchain.

The Graphene network focuses on growing and serving the community, maximizing the concept of decentralization, and enhancing the network's scalability to handle the transaction volume. The network also aims to support innovation and new usage model, robust functionality to solve real-world problems, ease of usage for both developers and end-users, and more. Similarly, the architectural blockchain of Graphene compartmentalizes the layers of the blockchain consensus, data, and execution. Also, different parts of the network process each layer simultaneously, without sacrificing decentralization or security.

As per its litepaper, the network has GFN as the native utility token on the Binance Smart Chain (BSC). The primary utility of the token is rewarding the validators and holders. GFN is also utilized to pay for the transaction fees on the network and for on-chain governance.

The Graphene network was created by the team behind Phore cryptocurrency. Some of the team members of Graphene include Michael Trisko serving as the CEO, Thomas Ambler as COO, and Julian Meyer as Chief Architect. GFN has a maximum supply of 230,000,000 tokens.