In this seminar I will review the theory of flat G-chains, as they were introduced by H. W. Fleming in 1966, and currents with coefficients in groups. One of the most recent development of the theory concerns its application to the Steiner tree problem and other minimal network problems which are related with a Eulerian formulation of the branched optimal transport. Starting from a 2016 paper by A. Marchese and myself, I will show how these problems are equivalent to a mass-minimization problem in the framework of currents with coefficients in a (suitably chosen) normed group.