• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Forta launches with $23M to bring better security to smart contracts

September 30, 2021 by David Barret Leave a Comment

Blockchain cybersecurity startup OpenZeppelin this morning announced a $23 million investment in Forta, a security service aimed at smart contracts.

Andreessen Horowitz led the round, which OpenZeppelin CEO and co-founder Demian Brener described as 3x oversubscribed. The investment also attracted capital from Coinbase Ventures, True Ventures and Blockchain Capital, among others.

Per Brener, OpenZeppelin will retain a stake in Forta.

Forta is a neat project that comes at an interesting point for the larger blockchain community. When bitcoin came to market, it attracted interest as a potential medium of exchange, or perhaps a store of value. The latter use case wound up being the key bitcoin value offering. But while bitcoin was maturing, other blockchains were built that featured more native programmability, allowing developers around the world to leverage smart (self-executing) contracts for a host of use cases.

Ethereum is one of the best-known blockchains to feature smart contracts, which its foundation describes simply as “program[s] that [run] on the Ethereum blockchain.” There’s more nuance to the matter, but that will suffice for our needs today. Forta, in turn, wants to help secure smart contracts across the blockchain market.

We summarized it as an attempt to build Web 3.0 security using Web 3.0 DNA when we were chatting with Brener, and he agreed. By that, we mean that Forta isn’t precisely the sort of company that TechCrunch tends to write about when it comes to venture capital fundraises; instead, Forta is nearly an attempt to empower a community of developers to build the tooling that they need to keep their own projects secure.

The heart of Forta, Brener explained, is a community of “agent writers,” or developers creating pieces of code that hunt up threats — on layer-one or -two chains, and sidechains — that fall into one of four main buckets of risk, namely cybersecurity, financial, operational or governance. The other half of the Forta project is nodes, or essentially what runs the agents themselves.

Per OpenZeppelin, lots of the code used to write Forta agents will be repurposable, which could help code get written once and then deployed with variations to many chains. This is what Brener means when he thinks of Forta as helping developers in the larger blockchain world help themselves.

And the concept is not idle. Per a release from Forta, the team behind the project thinks that the “pace of innovation on public blockchains” is rapid enough that no “centralized solution can effectively address these evolving risks.” So, threats attacking the decentralized market will have to be solved, in Forta’s view, by even more decentralized activity.

TechCrunch was obviously curious how the Forta project would make money. Brener said that for the project to become a business, it will need to first help its community thrive. Part of that is opening its doors a little more today, allowing more developers than it did during its private beta to write agents.

Presuming that Forta can attract as many developers as it hopes, it will become a centralized source of smart contract security tooling. From that point, making money won’t be impossible, though it will be interesting to see precisely what business model Forta eventually chooses.

On the point of organizational centrality, Forta is today run by a set of folks. In time, the company could become a decentralized autonomous organization, or DAO, Brener said. If that bears out, the blockchain community will have managed to take external capital and internal knowledge, blended the two into a development community, and built not only security tooling for smart contracts, but managed to do so under the auspices of its own smart contract (DAO). So, this is at once a venture capital story and also a meta-moment for how far the crypto world has come in terms of taking care of itself.

I am sure that at some point in the above paragraphs I got something slightly wrong. Such is the risk of covering nascent efforts to build security tooling for the cutting-edges of the digital economy. But what matters more than any particular quibble is that the blockchain world is working to build the tools it needs to keep smart contracts safe; by doing so, using smart contracts should become less risky. And less risk means more market appetite.

That’s something that a16z, with its huge crypto-focused bets, and companies like Coinbase are more than in favor of. The dollars flowing toward Forta are a rounding error for its wealthy backers, even if its possible impact on their favorite market might be anything but.

a16z’s new $2.2B fund won’t just bet on the crypto future, it will defend it

Source Link Forta launches with $23M to bring better security to smart contracts

David Barret
David Barret

Related posts:

  1. Evacuated Afghans, hoping to resettle in U.S., face extended limbo in third countries
  2. Daily Crunch: Fintech startup Jeeves snags $500M valuation after $57M Series B
  3. Tyk raises $35M for its open-source, open-ended approach to enterprise API management
  4. Honda Motor Co announces plans for eVTOL, avatar robots and space technologies

Filed Under: News

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

  • C/2025 A6 (Lemmon) Closest Earth Approach Is Next Month – Will We See It With The Naked Eye?
  • In 2013, A Volcanic Eruption Wiped Out Life On This Remote Island. Then, Somehow, Plants Reemerged
  • 1-Year-Old Orca Takes Out A Big Fat Seal In This Award-Winning – And Extremely Badass – Photo
  • Saturn And Neptune Will Reach Their Brightest In Days – And Look For Saturn’s Temporary Beauty Spot
  • Reindeer Bring A Gift Greater Than Any Of Santa’s – Hope Of A Stable Climate
  • If Deep-Sea Pressure Can Crush A Human Body, How Do Deep-Sea Creatures Not Implode?
  • Meet Ned: The Lonely Lefty Snail Looking For Love
  • “America Will Lead The Next Giant Leap”: NASA Announces New Milestone In Hunt For Exoplanets
  • What Did Neanderthals Sound Like?
  • One Star System Could Soon Dazzle Us Twice With Nova And Supernova Explosions
  • Unethical Experiments: When Scientists Really Should Have Stopped What They Were Doing Immediately
  • The First Humans Were Hunted By Leopards And Weren’t The Apex Predators We Thought They Were
  • Earth’s Passage Through The Galaxy Might Be Written In Its Rocks
  • What Is An Einstein Cross – And Why Is The Latest One Such A Unique Find?
  • If We Found Life On Mars, What Would That Mean For The Fermi Paradox And The Great Filter?
  • The Longest Living Mammals Are Giants That Live Up To 200 Years In The Icy Arctic
  • Entirely New Virus Detected In Bat Urine, And It’s Only The 4th Of Its Kind Ever Isolated
  • The First Ever Full Asteroid History: From Its Doomed Discovery To Collecting Its Meteorites
  • World’s Oldest Pachycephalosaur Fossil Pushes Back These Dinosaurs’ Emergence By 15 Million Years
  • The Hole In The Ozone Layer Is Healing And On Track For Full Recovery In The 21st Century, Thanks To Science
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version