By Riley Kaminer
Solana played a protagonistic role in last week’s $1 trillion crypto crash after regulators spooked digital asset investors by charging major exchanges Coinbase and Binance with a smattering of violations.
The SEC also classified Solana – alongside fellow cryptocurrencies Cardano and Polygon – as unregistered securities. That led Robinhood to stop supporting these currencies and Crypto.com to halt services for US-based institutional traders.
It was a veritable “bloodbath,” asserted trader Lark Davis. “SEC protecting investors again!” he quipped.
But amid this dire situation, the blockchain continues to grow and a ray of hope came this week, from Miami no less.
Serverless Solana development platform Ironforge yesterday announced that it has raised a $2.6 million pre-seed round led by Reciprocal Ventures. Other investors include Miami-based Hash3, 6th Man Ventures, Alchemy, Monoceros Ventures and Portage Ventures. These funds will enable Ironforge to build their platform and expand their team.
The startup, which also released its product in a private beta yesterday, aims to make it easier for developers to integrate the blockchain powering Solana into existing systems. The idea is that the novel nature of Solana makes developing on its blockchain tricky. Ironforge reduces this complexity by simplifying app integrations and giving developers shortcuts to popular features.
“I’ve had the longstanding conviction that blockchain’s potential won’t be unlocked until web3 devs have access to frameworks and tooling that are similar to what we’ve grown accustomed to in web2,” Ironforge CEO Italo Casas said in a statement.
“We created Ironforge to ensure developers need to do as little undifferentiated work as possible, devoting as much of their time and energy towards the thing that makes their product unique.”
Casas founded Ironforge in August 2022. Previously, he founded MetaSoftware Labs and was a senior software engineer at Lavu, Bankrate, and FlexShopper – on top of being on the Node.js core team.
Despite the recent drop in Solana as a cryptocurrency, the ecosystem surrounding is growing. As of the end of May, the chain saw over 12.67 million active addresses, representing 64.1% month-on-month growth. Additionally, Solana has recorded consistent month over month growth in active addresses on the network in 2023.
“The Ironforge platform has the potential to become the global standard for creating applications on Solana,” asserted Craig Burel, partner at Reciprocal Ventures. “By providing a seamless and delightful developer experience, we expect Ironforge will accelerate the utilization of web3 across the broader developer ecosystem.”
“Ironforge lowers the barrier to configure, deploy and maintain production grade programs on Solana, accelerating innovation cycles and enabling developers to spend more time on feature development,” added Carl Vogel from 6th Man Ventures. “We are thrilled to back Ironforge as they make Web3 development as seamless as Web2.”
Interested in checking out Ironforge’s platform? Join the waitlist here.
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