The global financial system is entering a period of rapid change. Assets from stablecoins and equities to corporate and government debt are moving onto blockchains in a process known as tokenization. Wall Street firms, regulators in Washington, and some of the world’s most recognizable brands are all exploring what this shift could mean. At the same time, consumers are asking for safer and simpler ways to earn yield, while artificial intelligence reshapes nearly every aspect of daily life.
Crypto has promised to connect these forces but has often fallen short. Infrastructure remains fragmented, user experiences are difficult, and most networks were never built with mainstream adoption in mind. Flow, one of the fastest-growing crypto networks in the world, believes its new upgrade can change that.
Introducing Forte
Flow has launched Forte, a network upgrade designed to make crypto more valuable and usable for everyday consumers. The Forte testnet is live now, with the mainnet launch scheduled for October 22.
Forte provides a shared foundation for decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols, enabling open finance to scale in ways it has not been able to before. The upgrade makes the tokenized economy programmable and composable while embedding automation directly into the network itself. Instead of depending on off-chain bots or custodians, developers can use native features to build more secure and efficient applications.
“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.”
Why Flow Thinks It’s Different
Flow is no stranger to mainstream audiences. It is already the home of consumer and gaming apps for organizations such as the NBA, NFL, Disney, and Ticketmaster. Millions of transactions take place on the network each month, and total value locked on Flow increased more than 600% in the past year, crossing the $100 million mark in August.
Forte builds on this foundation with technology Flow argues is uniquely suited for finance. Its architecture separates responsibilities across five specialized node types, allowing transactions to process at global scale. This design also prevents maximum extractable value (MEV) by dividing block building and block proposing, ensuring fair execution.
Cadence, Flow’s secure smart contract language, underpins Forte’s programmability. Built with a resource-oriented model, Cadence supports powerful logic while prioritizing safety and security. These technical features combine with Flow’s consumer-friendly design, which has emphasized usability and low costs since the network’s inception.
Building for Trust and Scale
Flow’s leadership sees Forte as a way to give developers the consistency they need and users the confidence they lack in many existing platforms.
“Forte gives developers a consistent foundation to build applications without relying on fragmented workarounds,” said Dieter Shirley, Chief Architect of Flow. “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.”
That combination of scale, security, and consumer-first design underscores Flow’s broader vision. In an industry still searching for infrastructure that can bring tokenization to the mainstream, Forte represents Flow’s attempt to prove that DeFi can be both trustworthy and usable at the level everyday people expect.
