Forta is a decentralized monitoring system, but without enough incentives for bot developers, the entire economic ecology may be difficult to develop. There will be no community users to actively help write surveillance bots. If contract holders are expected to monitor themselves, why would they use forta instead of writing their own scripts? Maybe bot developers can make money by marking their bots as a paid subscription system.
Hi Decode. I completely agree it is essential to provide incentives to detection bot developers to push the frontier of the network’s threat detection capabilities. If we look at what there is at the moment, there are contests (like this one live at the moment), and also matching funding at Gitcoin Grants Round 15 (link here).
Regarding your point of devs of protocols (or anyone deploying smart contracts) deciding to write their own detection bots instead of scripts, I think there are plenty of reasons why someone would use Forta instead of their own scripts. However, for Forta to succeed and protect the whole ecosystem, it is not enough with just them and there need to be incentives for any developer or security researcher to spend time on writing detection bots that can detect the next hack.
An interesting case would be if there are fees for subscribing to alerts, as discussed here in the forum, a portion of them could be assigned to the detection bot developer.
Thoughts?
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Hi Dani. I already know about existing incentives (Gitcoin, contests). But I think the incentives of the decentralized network should be driven by permissionless autonomy, not by the foundation.
And I have read this forum. I think both deposit-based and fee-based are both fine, so why can’t we keep both? A low price deposit-based is what every subscriber needs, but fee-based is what bot developers need for tipping. Just like the Ethereum eip-1559 proposal, it is divided into two parts: base and priority. The difference is that the priority of forta is defined by the robot developer and is a relatively fixed value in the short term.
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Yes, I agree with you and also think that there should be non arbitrary incentives for bot developers at the network level, which could be a percentage of the fees that that bot collects, or a fixed amount per subscription that the developer may set. I am sure there can be even better ideas that the Forta community can come up with and all together design a great incentive model, where developers are rewarded for their creativity and skills.
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I’m glad to hear these kinds of thoughts from the community and the foundation, thanks for your reply.
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