Lesson 1 – The Watchers of the Blockchain: What Is Forta and Why It Matters
Welcome to the first meditation on your path as a Blockchain Security Monitoring Monk.
Today, we start this Forta Bot development training course by lighting the first candle of awareness and answer a simple, yet powerful question:
What exactly is Forta?
And why should you care if you’re walking the path toward blockchain security as a developer?
What Is Forta?
Forta is a decentralized security monitoring protocol for blockchains.
Still sounds too vague? Let’s translate that into daily life analogy:
Imagine Ethereum is a vast city. People walk the streets (transactions), shops open and close (smart contracts), and every now and then, someone robs a bank (hacker exploits a vulnerability).
Who is watching?… Not the police, this is crypto. The duty falls on the watchers.
So Forta is the decentralized surveillance system for blockchain cities.
It runs thousands of tiny bots (called agents) that keep watch over specific activities. If something suspicious happens… boom … it raises an alert.
Why Do We Need Forta?
Ethereum and other blockchains don’t have built-in systems to yell “FIRE!” when something bad happens.
Forta fills that gap by offering:
Real-time detection of exploits
Custom bots to monitor your own protocols
Alert feeds for threat intelligence teams
A way for anyone to contribute bots to the global defense system
Forta in Plain Terms
Let’s break it down into its key building blocks:
Real Bot Example: The "High Transfer" Bot
Here’s what an agent might do:
It listens for ETH transfers.
If it sees someone sending more than 1,000 ETH in a single transaction...
It emits an alert.
It doesn’t stop the transfer. But it raises the flag. That alert can then be:
Logged
Sent to a Discord/Telegram channel
Integrated with a threat dashboard
How Forta Works – Step by Step
Let’s visualize the full process like a pipeline:
From Transaction to Alert (The Forta Flow)
Someone sends a transaction on Ethereum.
Scan node sees the tx and feeds it to your agent.
Your agent analyzes the tx using your logic (
handleTransaction()).If suspicious, the agent emits an Alert.
The Alert is pushed to:
Forta Explorer
APIs
Slack/Telegram
Your Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) system
What You Can Do With Forta
Once you know how to write Forta agents, you can:
Monitor your own protocol for internal failures or misuse.
Protect users by detecting rug pulls or contract upgrades.
Detect attacker behaviors like flash loans, phishing airdrops, MEV frontrunning, etc.
Automate security alerting for smart contracts, DAOs, or token events.
Why This Lesson is important
As a Forta Administrator or blockchain security operator, you will:
Deploy and maintain these agents
Monitor their uptime, gas usage, and performance
Coordinate alerts to internal systems
Collaborate with devs and researchers to turn ideas into working security bots
Today’s lesson is your compass. From now on, you will not only read the chain but you will watch it.
🙏 Until next meditation,
The Blockchain Security Monk