Brandy Betz
Brandy covers crypto-related venture capital deals for CoinDesk.
Blockchain security firm Forta introduced a native token, FORT, to provide an incentive to secure the network. Forta was born from blockchain security startup OpenZeppelin late last year with a $23 million fundraise led by Andreessen Horowitz.
Smart contract security broadly breaks down into pre-deployment checks and post-deployment runtime security, which includes real-time monitoring. Forta belongs to the latter category, adding incident and emergency response functions.
“I think a great analogy for Forta is a giant security camera and alarm system for Web 3. But we're a decentralized security camera and alarm system,” Andrew Beal, Forta’s lead ecosystem developer, told CoinDesk in an interview.
The Forta network has two components: bots and nodes. Bots are snippets of code that developers write to look for specific problems and send out alerts, they act as small, specialized security cameras. Nodes are essentially software dedicated to running the bots against each block of transactions on the supported blockchains.
Forta allows any developer in the ecosystem to publish and run a bot for free. Node runners have been manually brought into the system in the past, a process that's changing with the token launch. .
The FORT token will now be required for a node runner, who will have to stake it as a security measure. If the runner does something malicious, the staked tokens will be slashed. Runners with below-average performance can also suffer a financial penalty
Forta plans to introduce developer staking to discourage the submission of spam or malicious bots.
Holders of FORT will be able to use the token to vote on governance proposals. Forta recently held its first vote to nominate a seven-member governance council to help guide the network until it moves to fully decentralized decisions.
FORT has a 1 billion total supply right now, Beal said. Forta isn’t currently contemplating any inflation, or continuous issuance of the token over time, but Beal said it’s “not out of the realm of possibility in the future.”
Beal said Forta hasn’t publicly shared a token supply distribution plan, but he noted that it’s common in decentralized finance (DeFi) for roughly half of the token supply to be allocated to the community, set aside in the treasury and used for infrastructure growth. The other half goes to early investors, team members and advisors.
“We’re really excited to publicly launch FORT,” said Beal. “It signals that Forta is now a completely permissionless network.”
