Forta, the smart contract security protocol that raised $23 million in an oversubscribed Series A this summer, has debuted their Forta Live app today.
A decentralized offering incubated by the team of security experts at OpenZeppelin, Forta Protocol bills itself as “the first decentralized community-based security platform to prevent or mitigate smart contract exploits as they occur.” It is built to be the home for communities of security expert coders, who develop “Agents” code scripts that scan blockchains for irregularities, unusual transactions, and other suspicious activity that could be indicative of a targeted attack. Forta then broadcasts these alerts to DeFi, NFT, and DAO projects to help them stay secure in critical situations, along with a protocol for platform developers, investors, node operators, and integrators to enhance security and minimize risk.
Since debuting in July and launching its public beta in September, Forta has reached some significant milestones already. Over 100 Forta agents built by its community of developers, in collaboration with leading DeFi projects, and over 10,000 engaged community members on its security-centric Discord channel.
With Forta Live, Web3 security has taken a major step forward towards reaching the maturity required for widespread adoption. Here’s why:
Suite of New Features to make smart contracts safer:
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Forta Connect
Forta Connect is a self-service portal for agent developers to launch and manage their agents and alerts. Using a Metamask wallet, developers will be able to publish their agents anonymously and have the associated gas fees covered by Forta. Forta Connect will also serve as an agent developer profile, which includes information about the agents a developer has already published and badges and awards given for their work.
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Forta Explorer
The new Forta Explorer gives users a brand new interface and the ability to easily find and reference published agents. The new Explorer allows individuals and teams to subscribe to alerts for particular events or smart contracts watched, that will arrive in their email or Slack via webhook integration. These alerts give protocol development teams, investors, and integrators the ability to be quickly and easily notified when the security alarms go off that indicate a potential exploit of their own or dependent system. In these mission critical situations, the new Explorer gives users a crucial leg up in resolving issues before they become expensive problems.
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Private Alerts
Though Forta is a public infrastructure by default, there are circumstances that may be more sensitive than others. When detecting a particularly sensitive vulnerability or exploit, developers, and investors now have the option to keep it private and react to it before notifying their communities — or, inadvertently, a hacker.
OpenZeppelin Defender Integration
Forta is currently incubated in-part by the team at OpenZeppelin, one of the world’s leading smart contract security companies. Coming November 15th, Forta will integrate with OpenZeppelin’s flagship Defender suite, which will enable teams to automate smart contract operations in critical security conditions.
Defender manages the smart contract operations of Aave, Yearn, The Graph, PoolTogether, Status, Mirror, Foundation, Opyn, and many other leading projects, as well as thousands of individual users. As of today, it will now allow projects to receive Forta alerts in their Defender app dashboard, and to use those Forta alerts as triggers for auto-tasks. This integration goes a long way towards reducing the likelihood of successful exploits at every scale, from the personal to the institutional.
Migration to Polygon Chain
During the private beta launch, Forta’s contracts and agent registry were maintained on Ethereum’s Goerli testnet for the sake of cost efficiency and speed. Just last week, though, Forta made the move to Polygon, the world’s leading Layer 2 solution built on Ethereum. This migration to Polygon’s MATIC network gives Forta the infrastructure it needs to horizontally scale nodes to cope with the increased usage, and a new assigner for agent registry listing. Now, when a developer publishes an agent, it will be registered in a Polygon smart contract, and the agent code will live in a docker container on IPFS.
Blockchain Security Innovation
Forta is breaking new ground in the decentralized security space. Backed by an outstanding team, this young venture has attracted investment from the world’s leading blockchain partners and seems well on its way to making the blockchain safer, more secure, and more user-friendly for all.
Forta will continue to integrate other smart contract operations platforms as they come to market, and already possesses an exceptionally strong community dedicated to decentralization and smart contract security. Additional support and features will continue to be added as the project progresses.
If you’re a Python or Java developer interested in creating Agents, paid contests are live on the Forta developer website. And for those building, investing or integrating with DeFi, NFTs, or DAO protocols , you can go ahead and try the Forta app today.
This is Forta’s biggest leap yet, and there are many more to come. Learn more about the project, and the crucial need for Decentralized Security, at Forta.org.
