PublicNode alternatives

PublicNode is the no-key public RPC service operated by Allnodes, covering 70+ chains with endpoints anchored close to a large EU-resident validator footprint. It is the de-facto default fallback for many dapps because it shows up on most EVM networks at once and serves archive-depth state on most of them. Comparing it against the other candidates a developer might paste into a wallet config or a backend service is per chain and per region, not per marketing page. This benchmark probes `eth_blockNumber` every 15 seconds against 15 audited no-key RPC providers across 10 EVM chains (Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, Optimism, Avalanche, BNB, Polygon, Linea, Scroll, Mantle) from three Railway regions (us-east, eu-west, sgp). Latency is recorded with millisecond precision and exposed as both a gauge and a histogram so p50, p90 and p99 are computed via Prometheus `quantile_over_time` over the last 24 hours. A five-class result label catches endpoints that answer HTTP 200 with a JSON-RPC error body or serve a stale head more than 20 blocks behind the cross-provider tip, and a separate archive-depth probe runs every 5 minutes across five depths (300 to 5,000,000 blocks). The cohort competing with PublicNode includes dRPC, 1RPC, MeowRPC, Tenderly Gateway, Nodies, Lava, Merkle, Flashbots Protect and Cloudflare, plus the chain-official foundation endpoints on Base, BNB, Arbitrum, Optimism and Avalanche. The chain tab filters every query so the leader is reported per network, not as a cross-chain aggregate.