Jack Kubinec

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The Solana liquid-staking startup Sanctum has acquired Ironforge in an all-cash deal, Lightspeed has learned exclusively.&nbsp;



Sanctum did not disclose the deal terms. Ironforge’s team, founded by Italo Casas, will join Sanctum, according to a blog post.



Ironforge builds Solana infrastructure, including for landing transactions on the network. With the acquisition, Sanctum plans to add transaction infrastructure as a business vertical.



Sanctum emerged in mid-2024 as a buzzy new Solana startup after going through Solana’s startup incubator. Until now, the project has focused on liquid staking tokens, which are tokenized representations of staked SOL. Its flagship product is INF, a liquid staking token that holds a basket of Solana LSTs.&nbsp;



After a much-talked-about points program gave way to a <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/lightspeed-newsletter-sanctum-airdrop-backlash">somewhat-controversial</a> airdrop, Sanctum has added a couple new business lines. One was <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/solana-liquid-staking-startup-trial">creator coins</a>, LSTs which share rewards with creators. Another was what are essentially <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/sanctum-adding-binance-bitget-bybit-as-partners">white-label LSTs</a>, starting with Binance, Bitget and Bybit. 



It was while working with these partners that Sanctum realized how difficult it can be to land transactions on Solana. The onchain pain became particularly acute during Donald Trump’s <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/trump-more-than-a-memecoin">memecoin launch</a>, which left Solana very congested.&nbsp;



“Solving that problem meant either building a solution from scratch ourselves or teaming up with the best developers already working in that niche,” Sanctum said in a blog post, adding: “Ironforge was that team.”



And so, Sanctum has struck out on a non-LST business vertical for the first time.



“[There are] a profusion of transaction landing solutions on Solana and no good way to observe and adjudicate their performance. [We] aggregate and make observability a first class citizen giving developers full control and observability,” Sanctum co-founder FP Lee said.



Ironforge did not immediately return a request for comment.



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