If you have collected an NBA Top Shot highlight, explored NFL All Day, or seen Disney and Ticketmaster experiment with blockchain, you have already been using Flow. The network has become one of the fastest-growing blockchains in the world by focusing on consumer-friendly design and major brand partnerships. Now Flow is stepping into finance with a new upgrade called Forte.
The Forte testnet recently launched with the mainnet set to follow on October 22. While Flow built its reputation powering apps for sports and entertainment, Forte is an effort to broaden that success into decentralized finance. The upgrade is designed to give developers tools to create applications that ordinary people can trust and use while also providing the scale required for mainstream adoption.
Forte is Flow’s attempt to bring the same ease of use that made digital collectibles popular into the more complex world of finance. The upgrade provides a shared foundation for decentralized finance protocols, allowing them to be built on a common layer that is both programmable and composable. It also introduces automation at the network level, removing the need for off-chain bots or custodians that have been common workarounds in other ecosystems.
For Flow’s leadership, this move aligns with the direction of global finance. “Trillions of dollars of assets are being tokenized, and every person will eventually have a wallet, which means the next generation of financial apps must be designed with everyday users in mind,” said Roham Gharegozlou, CEO of Dapper Labs and Co-Founder of Flow. “Most networks weren’t built for consumers, but Flow was. Forte extends our original purpose, to support applications built for millions of people, into finance. With our Forte upgrade, developers can now create DeFi apps that are both reliable and accessible, which is what’s required if tokenization is going to live up to its potential.”
Accessibility has been at the heart of Flow since the beginning. The network was designed to offer lower costs, better usability, and a smoother experience than many other blockchains. That emphasis has paid off. Over the past year, Flow’s total value locked grew by more than 600% and passed the $100 million milestone in August.
Forte also builds on Flow’s unique technical design. The network’s architecture separates responsibilities across five specialized node types, which allows transactions to process at scale and prevents maximum extractable value (MEV). MEV can occur when validators reorder transactions for profit. On top of this foundation, Flow offers Cadence, its resource-oriented smart contract language created to support secure and complex financial logic.
According to Flow’s Chief Architect, Forte is about providing consistency to developers and trust to users. “Forte gives developers a consistent foundation to build applications without relying on fragmented workarounds. It’s about building the blocks for the next phase of crypto with tools that are open, reliable, and designed to scale far beyond early adopters. By embedding automation and security at the network level, Forte makes it possible to create apps that everyday people can actually trust and use,” said Dieter Shirley.
That focus on trust and usability has been central to Flow’s rise. Its work with brands such as the NBA and NFL showed that blockchain could reach millions of people in a way that felt seamless and approachable. Forte is intended to extend that same level of accessibility into decentralized finance.
For now, the launch of the testnet gives developers a chance to experiment with the upgrade’s capabilities before the full rollout in October. What matters most is the larger statement: Flow is positioning itself to show that DeFi can be as approachable as digital entertainment. Forte is the step it hopes will prove that consumer-first blockchain applications are ready for finance.
Spencer Hulse is the Editorial Director at Grit Daily. He is responsible for overseeing other editors and writers, day-to-day operations, and covering breaking news.
