Ironforge

Ironforge is a Web3 DevOps platform built specifically for Solana developers. It abstracts away the complexity of managing RPC infrastructure so that product teams can concentrate on writing application code rather than wrestling with endpoint reliability, request routing, and observability tooling. At its peak the platform routed approximately one-third of all transaction volume on Solana, making it one of the most consequential pieces of quiet infrastructure in the ecosystem. In July 2025, Sanctum acquired Ironforge; the product continues to operate at ironforge.sanctum.so.

The Problem Ironforge Solves

Running production-grade applications on Solana demands reliable, low-latency access to RPC endpoints. A single RPC provider is a single point of failure. During periods of network congestion — the TRUMP token launch is a widely cited example — teams that relied on a single endpoint saw transactions stall or drop entirely. Beyond availability, developers lacked unified tooling to understand what was happening inside their transaction pipelines: which endpoints were slow, which requests were failing, how much compute was being consumed, and what priority fees were being paid.

Ironforge addresses both dimensions. On the networking side it aggregates multiple RPC endpoints behind a single gateway. On the observability side it gives teams a dashboard view across every layer of their transaction stack.

How It Works

RPC Load Balancing

The core of Ironforge is its load balancer. Developers configure a set of RPC endpoints — from any combination of providers — and the platform routes traffic across them according to configurable strategies.

Sequential routing forwards each request to the first available endpoint in a ranked list, falling through to the next if the primary endpoint is unavailable. This approach minimises unnecessary RPC calls while providing automatic failover.

Parallel routing fires the request to all configured endpoints simultaneously and returns whichever response arrives first. This reduces latency at the cost of higher RPC consumption, and is suited to latency-sensitive operations such as transaction submission.

Weighted routing lets teams assign a traffic percentage to each endpoint, useful for gradually migrating between providers or giving preference to a lower-latency or lower-cost endpoint while retaining failover capacity. Enhanced weighted routing with failover support was shipped in December 2024.

Ironforge also implements slot drift protection, which detects when an endpoint's slot height falls behind the network tip and automatically deprioritises it until it catches up. WebSocket connections are supported alongside standard HTTP RPC.

Security and Firewall

An advanced firewall sits in front of every load balancer. Teams can configure rules in default-allow or default-deny modes and layer specific controls on top:

• Rate limiting by IP address, restricting how many requests any single origin can send per second
• IP and domain whitelisting and blacklisting, so only known clients can reach the endpoint
• RPC method blocking, which prevents specific methods (such as sendTransaction) from being called except by authorised callers — a particularly useful guard against transaction spam

Firewall v2, released in January 2025, significantly expanded the rule-composition capabilities. Audit logs, giving a timestamped record of every firewall-rule change, were added alongside header-forwarding support in January 2025.

Observability and Analytics

Ironforge's analytics layer surfaces the metrics that matter for production Solana applications:

• Transaction landing rate and drop rate
• Slot latency between submission and confirmation
• Compute unit consumption per transaction
• Priority fee analysis across the transaction set
• Error logs with filterable views by RPC method, endpoint, and time window

An interactive timeline view and enhanced line charts for visualising load-balancer and endpoint health were introduced in November 2024. The platform also added AI-powered log filter generation, allowing developers to describe what they want to find in natural language.

Alerts

The alerts system lets teams set thresholds on any monitored metric and receive notifications via Slack, Discord, or PagerDuty when those thresholds are crossed. Multiple alert recipients per project are supported, enabling on-call rotations.

Key Features at a Glance

• Multi-endpoint RPC gateway with sequential, parallel, and weighted routing
• Automatic failover and slot drift protection
• Advanced firewall with rate limiting, IP controls, and RPC method filtering
• Transaction analytics: compute units, priority fees, confirmation rates, error logs
• Audit logs and header forwarding
• Integrations with Slack, Discord, and PagerDuty for incident alerting

Ecosystem Adoption

Ironforge was trusted by a range of prominent Solana teams including Jupiter, Kamino Finance, Orca, Solflare, Switchboard, Crossmint, and Bonk. The breadth of adoption across DEX aggregators, lending protocols, wallet providers, and oracle networks reflects the horizontal nature of the infrastructure problem Ironforge addresses: any application that submits transactions has a stake in the reliability and observability of its RPC layer.

Team and Funding

Ironforge was founded in 2022 by Italo Casas. In June 2023 the company raised a $2.6 million pre-seed round led by Reciprocal Ventures, with participation from Hash3, 6th Man Ventures, Alchemy, Monoceros Ventures, and Portage Ventures. Angel investors included Rodrigo Fernandez Touza of Crossmint and Stepan Simkin of Squads Protocol.

The Ironforge team brought years of backend and infrastructure engineering experience, and built the platform to the point where it was handling a third of all Solana transaction volume before the acquisition.

Tokens and Assets

Ironforge has no native token. The platform operates as a subscription-based infrastructure service.

Acquisition by Sanctum

On July 18, 2025, Sanctum announced the acquisition of Ironforge. Sanctum, best known as the leading liquid staking infrastructure provider on Solana, identified reliable on-chain transaction delivery as a critical unmet need for its ecosystem partners. Rather than build that capability from scratch, Sanctum acquired Ironforge's battle-tested architecture and its engineering team.

Following the acquisition, Sanctum began integrating Ironforge's technology into a new product called Gateway — a transaction delivery aggregator that routes transactions through the optimal channel for a given situation: standard RPC providers, Jito bundles, Triton, or custom strategies. Gateway also adds full-stack transaction observability, fee optimisation, congestion handling, and real-time telemetry.

The original ironforge.cloud domain now permanently redirects to ironforge.sanctum.so, and the platform continues to operate under Sanctum's ownership. Sanctum has stated its ambition to become the core transaction layer for Solana's leading products and services, extending its infrastructure reach beyond liquid staking into every layer of transaction delivery.

Solana Ecosystem Fit

Ironforge occupies a foundational layer of the Solana developer stack. As Solana's throughput and user base have grown, the demands placed on RPC infrastructure have grown with them. Congestion events have exposed the risk of single-provider dependence, and the rise of MEV-aware transaction strategies has made routing decisions more consequential. Ironforge addressed both by giving developers granular control over how and where transactions are sent, backed by the observability needed to iterate on those decisions in production.

Its acquisition by Sanctum signals a broader consolidation of Solana's infrastructure layer, with the same teams that handle liquid staking liquidity now also handling the plumbing through which every transaction reaches the network.