What is Forta? What it is needed for and what problems this project solves.

Hey — hey! I glad that you are interested in studying Forta.

This article is the first of the pages of the course “Introduction to Forta”. If, after reading the information below, you are sincerely interested in further studying Forta, then be sure to follow the link and read other articles.

And we’re starting!…

P.s. In this article I will try to not use heavy terms as possible, it is very important to understand the project as an ordinary user. We will analyze the work of Forta in more detail in the following articles.

History of creating Forta

To understand the idea that the developers of the project are trying to implement, it is worth finding out how it was invented.

The idea of Forta was invented by OpenZeppelin. OpenZeppelin is a company engaged in the development of products that ensure the security of decentralized applications. In addition, the company conducts security audits of systems and products.

During its work, the company has managed to gain a great reputation and a big name. (They even worked with the Ethereum Foundation, wow).

So, interviewing its customers, OpenZeppelin realized that a large number of break-ins and thefts can be stopped in advance, but how? It is extremely difficult to track all transactions manually, trying to find something dangerous! We need to create a program that could check transactions independently and warn a person if it found suspicious activity.

Then the Forta project began to be developed. But the most interesting thing is ahead.

How does Forta work?

Forta is not just an application, it is a network in which the main components are Nodes and Bots. Their main task is to find suspicious transactions to warn about potentially dangerous actions carried out with the wallet address or contract.

Bots are scripts created by developers who can check each block or transaction for special parameters. If bots find something suspicious, they will send you an alarm to your messenger or email.

What transactions does the bot check? All! The main idea of the project, while you are sleeping, you can be sure that at this time the bot regularly checks every new transaction that appears interacting with your address or smart contract. That’s it!

Transactions that correspond to parameters similar to those specified by the developers and potentially may be considered suspicious aimed at harming the user, DeFi or DAO.

Nodes provide reliability, their tasks include supporting or restarting bots.

It’s simple, isn’t it?

An additional feature of Forta is that this network is decentralized, different developers can independently create their own bots, which will be able to prescribe their own detection parameters. [Or use public bots.]

For example, you can connect to a bot that will respond to any transaction with your address, and if someone uses the wallet without your knowledge, you will find out about it as soon as possible and will be able to save the remaining funds.

Imagine a different situation: If the bot finds suspicious actions at the address interacting with the contract, which is typical for intruders, the bot is able to give a signal to the “Defender” OpenZeppelin, which automatically activates pre-written code to prevent serious consequences. This can be an extremely useful feature for Apps, where hackers usually withdraw large funds from the project through fast loans.

It is important to know that Forta will not be limited to working in one blockchain, the project will be able to support multi-chain solutions of the first and second levels. At the moment, more than 600 different bots have been created, information about which you can study in the scanner.

Results:

After reading the information from this article, we can give this protocol a clear and understandable term. Forta is the first decentralized security system consisting of bots and nodes working together on the network.

It was fast wasn’t it? Thank you for reading, I hope I was able to help you understand the project, but do not stop there. Keep learning!

Next article: “Going deeper, what are nodes and bots?!“, but if you are confident in your knowledge about this, then you can read other useful information in the course “Introduction of beginners”.