I recently became interested in building my own NFT Marketplace with Flow.
While I understand that my users do not have to own FLOW tokens to use my dApp, it seems like I, as the marketplace operator, need to hold FLOW tokens to pay their transaction fees - FLOW Token - Flow Documentation
However, FLOW isn’t available for sale in the US on any crypto exchanges, and doesn’t seem to be available anywhere else.
Is there any way for developers in the US without a current FLOW token balance to access FLOW, so we can deploy dApps that can actually process transactions on the Flow blockchain?
Is it possible to deploy a working dApp on the Flow blockchain if neither I nor my users have any FLOW tokens?
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There is a testnet, I believe once you are ready to deploy to mainnet, they audit, they will have to help you with getting FLOW at that point. Ideally the UX for blockchain apps has to be where you pick up the transactional cost for the users on your platform.
I could be wrong but this is what I have gathered from what I have read.
Agreed that best UX would be to pay transaction fees 
It would be great if one of the team members could weigh in here. My only concern is that I’ll spend time developing a dApp that ends up being wasted - bc it isn’t accepted onto mainnet / they won’t facilitate transfer of FLOW
I also was under the impression that limited quantities of FLOW were already given out, that there’s no plan to release more, and that they can’t be traded for up to a year after being received from the team. How then would the team give me FLOW?
I think they will not be able to control what goes mainnet or not at some point. In order for their FLOW tokens to not be deemed securities, they really need to make their network decentralized… meaning anyone can build what they want.
Yes, eventually, mainnet will be completely open, but there are a few things that need to be done before that is safe, like enabling transaction fees, storage fees, more BFT, and better Cadence best practices.
Right now, your contract will need to be reviewed before deploying to mainnet, but as long as you don’t have anything nefarious in your smart contracts, it will get approved.
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We also have plans in progress to let US users deploy and use contracts before they can get FLOW, but we can’t talk too much about that yet
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