Blockchain Gaming Company Forte Invests $9M in Bolt Labs
Security and privacy startup Bolt Labs has received a $9 million investment from blockchain gaming company Forte.
Bolt Labs’ mission is to build usable, secure, and scalable infrastructure that enables everyone to securely store their keys while preserving the privacy of their transactions. Bolt enables private payments by leveraging zkChannels — an anonymous off-chain protocol that enables cheap and private value transfer between participants on the network.
Forte is building economic technology for games. Its end-to-end platform enables the emergence of community economics, a system where the interests of game developers and players are aligned, leading to healthier, sustainable game communities.
This three-year partnership with Bolt Labs will enable Forte’s strong community of millions of gamers and more than 40 game publishers to leverage state-of-the-art cryptographic technologies, empowering users to securely store keys for their game assets and make private payments.
Forte’s community of publishers, developers, and other content partners will also gain access to Bolt Labs’ secure key management solution, a technology that will facilitate custody of in-game assets and non-fungible tokens (NFT). Bolt Labs will provide this by leveraging multi-party computation (MPC) to help Forte secure keys for in-game cryptocurrency assets at scale, allowing players to control their assets securely and privately.
MPC allows a group of participants to evaluate a computation without any of them revealing their own private data, which can compute the value of a public function when put together without compromising the secrecy of each individual piece. This minimizes the risk of having their assets compromised or vulnerabilities exploited by bad actors. MPC is fast becoming the standard for digital asset security and it can deliver both usability and security in a decentralized system.
“With blockchain gaming becoming increasingly popular among mainstream audiences that might not be familiar with securing their crypto assets, it’s crucial that the right technology is deployed,” said J Ayo Akinyele, CEO and Co-founder at Bolt Labs. “That is, the technology that ensures asset security, confidentiality and prevents misuse while achieving true property rights for gamers in a web3 world. With MPC technology, we can secure digital assets at scale, with blockchain-agnostic, off-chain computations. Bolt is leading the way in developing and integrating this technology to help Forte realize its web3 gaming vision.”
“Forte has come a long way since we first began our journey to turn traditional gaming on its head by introducing community ownership and governance. Today, we’re the preferred platform for millions of gamers, and we aim to continue to grow our community by continually shoring up our compliance solutions and upgrading our infrastructure,” said Ronen Kirsh, VP of Strategic Partnerships, at Forte. “We believe Bolt Labs will have a significant impact on our user experience and will provide a hospitable environment for new entrants to remain safe and have a pleasant experience on Forte.”
