Ironforge

Ironforge built the DevOps layer that teams on Solana used to run production infrastructure without managing it themselves. Its managed RPC platform handled load balancing, transaction observability, and security across the protocols that collectively account for much of the network's activity. In July 2025, liquid-staking startup [[PROJECT:288]] acquired Ironforge in an all-cash deal, folding the engineering team into Sanctum and using the technology as the foundation for a new product category: transaction delivery infrastructure.

From Serverless Platform to Production DevOps

Ironforge launched in 2023 as what it called the first serverless development platform on Solana. The original product offered low-latency edge runtimes, account data parsing and caching, and a managed connection layer for RPC providers. In June 2023 the company raised $2.6 million in pre-seed funding led by Reciprocal Ventures, with participation from Hash3, 6MV, Alchemy, Monoceros, and Portage.

By December 2023 the team announced what it called a renewed mission, narrowing the product toward the DevOps problem that production Solana teams actually faced: managing multiple RPC providers, diagnosing failed transactions, and keeping services running through network congestion. That pivot defined the product that clients used through the acquisition.

RPC Load Balancing and Routing

The core of Ironforge's platform was a configurable load balancer that sat between a development team's application and its upstream RPC endpoints. Teams could connect multiple providers and apply routing rules to each method call.

Two routing modes covered most needs. Sequential routing sent requests to endpoints in order, falling back to the next provider only on failure. Parallel routing fired requests at all configured endpoints simultaneously and returned the first successful response, trading higher RPC spend for lower latency. Teams could apply different strategies to different RPC methods, giving granular control over latency-critical operations without paying parallel costs on every call.

The platform also included slot drift protection, which detected when an endpoint's reported slot was lagging behind the rest of the network and deprioritized it before stale data reached the application. WebSocket connections were supported alongside standard HTTP RPC.

Transaction Observability and Alerting

Ironforge tracked what happened to transactions after they left the application. The observability dashboard logged compute unit consumption and pricing, confirmation and drop rates, and detailed error output for each transaction. Teams could identify which transactions were undersizing compute budgets, where drops were occurring, and which endpoints were underperforming.

Alert integrations connected to Slack, Discord, and PagerDuty, so engineering and operations teams could receive real-time notification of endpoint health events without building their own monitoring. An incident management layer accompanied the alerting, providing a structured view of degraded service periods.

Security and Firewall

Ironforge's firewall layer gave teams control over what traffic could reach their applications and how their applications reached the RPC tier. Operators could configure rate limits, restrict access by IP address or domain, and block specific RPC methods entirely. The firewall supported both default-allow and default-deny postures.

A significant expansion in early 2025 introduced Firewall v2, which added complex rule support. Slot drift protection was added to the platform in January 2025 as a dedicated feature. The February 2025 changelog combined both capabilities in a single release.

Scale and Clients

At its operating peak, Ironforge handled up to one-third of all transaction volume on Solana, according to Sanctum's announcement of the acquisition. That figure reflects concentrated usage among large-scale protocols. The client list included Jupiter, Kamino Finance, Switchboard, Solflare, Orca, Marinade, Bonk, and Crossmint, among others.

The common thread was production teams that could not afford dropped transactions or extended RPC downtime and needed visibility into what was failing. High-frequency trading operations were a specific use case, where the platform's parallel routing and drop-rate monitoring mapped directly to landing rates and execution outcomes.

Sanctum Acquisition and Gateway

Sanctum acquired Ironforge in a deal announced on July 18, 2025. Terms were not disclosed. The acquisition brought Ironforge founder Italo and the engineering team into Sanctum, with Sanctum co-founder FP describing the team as building "fast, reliably, and with real conviction."

The strategic rationale was a gap Sanctum observed during periods of network congestion, notably around the TRUMP token launch, when reliable transaction delivery broke down across the ecosystem. Sanctum had the distribution through its liquid staking relationships; Ironforge had the transaction delivery architecture.

The joint product that followed is Sanctum Gateway, a transaction delivery aggregator. Gateway splits its work into two phases. In the Optimize phase, the API takes raw payloads and converts them into network-ready transactions, handling priority fee and Jito tip configuration dynamically without requiring code changes from the integrating team. In the Delivery phase, Gateway routes the prepared transactions through multiple channels simultaneously: standard RPCs, Triton Cascade, Paladin, and Jito Bundles. Gateway operates on a pay-as-you-go model, charging through tips rather than subscriptions, and can refund Jito tips when a transaction lands via a standard RPC channel.

Ironforge's own managed RPC product continues to operate under Sanctum. The ironforge.cloud domain permanently redirects to ironforge.sanctum.so, where the DevOps platform remains accessible.

Current Status

Ironforge operates as a product within Sanctum, with its original RPC management and observability capabilities intact alongside the new Gateway product. The engineering team responsible for the platform joined Sanctum through the 2025 acquisition. New development on the Ironforge product line reflects Sanctum's priorities in transaction infrastructure rather than the independent roadmap the company had planned before the deal.