Interview with Andrew Beal, Ecosystem Lead at Forta Foundation: A Web3 Security and Monitoring Network

Forta is a decentralized network for monitoring, detecting, and alerting users about potential threats and anomalies. You can imagine Forta as a giant security camera and alarm system watching over DeFi and NFTs. Today, the Forta Network protects over $36 billion across Ethereum, Polygon, Binance Smart Chain, Arbitrum, Optimism, Avalanche, and Fantom.

There are two primary components to the Forta Network – bots and scan nodes. Bots are pieces of code that act like little virtual security cameras, monitoring something specific on-chain. Scan nodes are like the alarm system behind the scenes that run the bots against each block of transaction. If a bot finds what it’s looking for in a block, the node running that bot emits a public alert.

Forta’s role in attack prevention is to detect threats and other malicious activity as early as possible. By alerting our users as early as possible, they have an opportunity to take preventative action.
 

How did you come up with the idea for Forta?

 
The Forta Network was incubated inside of OpenZeppelin, one of the largest Web 3 security companies and a leading smart contract auditor.

The concept of a decentralized, runtime security network was born out of a belief that public financial infrastructure (public blockchains, DeFi protocols and digital assets) needed a public monitoring layer as well.
 

How has Forta evolved over the last couple of years?

 
Forta was launched in Fall 2021 and the community has made amazing progress over the last year. Forta protects almost $36 billion of user assets across the seven largest EVM chains, including Ethereum. This translates to direct monitoring of 52% of the top 30 DeFi protocols’ TVL including MakerDAO, Compound, Lido, Aave, Balancer and more.

Forta now has 5,000+ Scan Nodes operating 900+ Detection Bots with over 14,000 user subscriptions.
 

What can we hope to see from Forta in the future?

 
Forta’s mission is to secure Web 3, and it’s going to happen through collaboration.

We’re excited to see more individual developers, and security and technology companies participating in the network and building on Forta…developing bots, improving threat detection and collaborating with others.

We’re also seeing more data science and machine learning techniques being applied to security, and the Forta Foundation has started engaging with those communities in Web 2 and academia as well.

Over the next year, expect the sophistication of threat detection in Web 3 to evolve rapidly.