Building the Future: Forta's 2024 Journey in On-Chain Threat Prevention

2024 was a transformative year for Forta and blockchain—let’s recap.

A Bittersweet Benchmark: $1.2 Billion in Preventable Looses

This year alone, crypto faced over $1.2 billion in losses across 202 attacks that could have been stopped. The industry is in the early stages of the next technology adoption curve. As adoption increases and bull markets follow, crypto becomes a target and attracts even more attention from bad actors. 

Forta's advanced machine learning model detects over 99% of exploits before they happen—virtually noise-free, with a false positive rate below 0.0001%. And it achieves all this in under 50 milliseconds.

But detection is only the first step: 2024 marked the launch of Forta Firewall—a revolutionary solution that detects and blocks malicious transactions before execution.

The Forta community’s mass approval of the Firewall governance proposal set the stage for allocating time and resources to this game-changing project. The Foundation, OpenZeppelin, and Nethermind teams came together to bring Firewall to life.

Introducing Forta Firewall Prevention = Detection + Blocking

The “firewall” approach is more effective at preventing exploits than auto-pausing contracts via front-running because it has total visibility into pending transactions (including those submitted via private channels) and it does not depend on being faster than the attacker.

Regardless of how an exploit is submitted (atomic or multiple transactions), it must pass through the Firewall before execution. 

Firewall is also censorship resistant—transactions are not permanently blocked, but delayed. The Forta Chain maintains an inbox with a queue of delayed transactions, which after a period can be resubmitted and automatically approved. Data that would have otherwise been stored centrally in a backend is stored and secured on the Forta Chain—to create a transparent security solution.

The Forta Firewall app: One of the multiple transactions flagged during the $4.75M Delta Prime DeFi attack—with a Critical risk score that would have stopped the malicious tx.

Driving Adoption Across the Ecosystem

On-chain security in 2024 is no longer optional—it's essential. 

Since 2021, Forta has been at the forefront of securing crypto and this year saw forward-thinking teams like Euler, Plume and Balmy joining 150+ blockchain projects that trust Forta to stay protected.

Forta’s new threat prevention solution is particularly useful for rollups and protocols to screen transactions in real time for security and compliance risks. RaaS providers, such as Conduit, have integrated with Forta Firewall to offer frictionless protection to their rollups—and any rollup using Conduit can now opt in to Forta Firewall protection without any development effort.

Still not using Forta Firewall? Sign up to learn more.

The FORT Token: Powering Community

With 20+ million FORT tokens staked, the network has been actively shielded against malicious activity—and the 2024 launch of the FORT vault brought a surge in holders by simplifying the delegated staking process.

Security is not—and should not be—reserved for experts alone; it’s a vital concern for every crypto user defenseless against scams and attacks.

The Forta community grew stronger in 2024. Without security, blockchain cannot scale, and Crypto’s shared vision of a Decentralized Economy is threatened. 

Looking Ahead to 2025

This year’s industry milestones have laid a strong foundation for the exciting opportunities ahead. 

Thank you for being part of the journey—here’s to a secure and prosperous 2025!

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Some 2024 Fun Facts

• The Forta team talked at EthDenver, Devcon, and TheEmergence—it’s not only AI running Forta :)
• Firewall’s launch was featured on The Block and we want to brag about it!‍
• Forta Council member Mat Travizano joined Argentine President Javier Milei on a Silicon Valley tour—meeting leaders like OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Apple’s Tim Cook, and a16z’s Marc Andreessen