Decentralized On-Chain Security Monitoring for the DeFi Community

How Compound Finance uses OpenZeppelin Defender and Forta Detection Bots to Push Alerts to the Community Discord

It is common for those in decentralized finance to suggest that others do their own research before investing in a given protocol. One of the key challenges for a user to gain confidence is to stay informed regarding security. What type of security monitoring does the developer team have in place to be notified in the event of an emergency? Who will receive these notifications?

The Compound Finance community server recently added a feed from OpenZeppelin Defender with centralized alerts from several Forta bots that push notifications to relevant channels in the Discord server. This integration empowers not only the developer team but all community members to be able to see security-critical notifications.

About Defender Sentinel

OpenZeppelin Defender’s Sentinel service gives users the ability to push custom alerts to email, Slack, Telegram, Discord, or Datadog. This service can integrate with smart contracts to monitor transactions for custom conditions on events, functions, or parameters such as gas price or value. A common use for a contract sentinel is to send a notification in the event that any sensitive function such as transferOwnership, pause, or upgrade gets called.

For more complex monitoring, users can also receive notifications through Defender’s integration with Forta. Forta detection bots can be created by anyone, and users can easily make use of existing bots. When connected to a Sentinel, the bot will watch every transaction and send an alert for any relevant ones, such as an unexpected spike in the volume of transactions.

Users can also easily link Sentinels to an Autotask to automatically execute custom logic when key events happen.

How Compound Uses Forta Sentinels

Compound’s team has chosen to push Defender Sentinel alerts to the community’s Discord so that anyone can view security-related activity that might affect their investment. The alert feeds are grouped according to type: governance, market, and security.

For the Compound developer team, the Defender dashboard gives easy access to each Sentinel, displaying the name of each detection bot along with the number of conditions being monitored.

This integration serves as a great example of the underlying spirit of transparency and user empowerment underpinning the DeFi space, and it effectively paves the way for others to follow suit.

To get started setting up a Forta Alert using OpenZeppelin Defender, check out this guide.

For information about Forta, check out the team’s excellent documentation to learn about subscribing to alerts, setting up detection kits, and more. When you are ready, visit the app to connect your wallet and subscribe to alerts.

OpenZeppelin Defender automates smart contract operations, allowing developers to deliver high-quality products faster and with less risk. Defender is continually updated with new features in response to developer and market needs. Sign up for a free account now!