Fastest free Avalanche RPC, live no-key endpoint latency
HTTP round-trip latency for eth_blockNumber against every free, no-key public Avalanche RPC endpoint, audited every 15 seconds from 3 regions.
Companion page
Comparing free RPC endpoints across every chain we measure? Open the cross-chain RPC matrix →
Avalanche's C-Chain field combines Ava Labs' official `api.avax.network` with 5 no-key multi-chain gateways. The official endpoint shows one of the tightest distributions among foundation RPCs, a contrast with the best-effort profiles on Arbitrum and Optimism. Every provider answers the identical probe every 15 seconds from us-east, eu-west and Singapore, with stale-head detection flagging anything more than 20 blocks behind the cross-provider tip.
Methodology
Per-chain member of the RPC latency cluster. We measure the round-trip latency of a single, identical RPC call (`eth_blockNumber`) against every no-key public Avalanche endpoint that sustains continuous probing, 6 providers, every 15 seconds, from us-east, eu-west and Singapore. The harness also classifies every response (ok / http_err / jsonrpc_err / stale / timeout) and audits archive depth every 5 minutes, so the leaderboard rewards sustained, honest availability rather than a fast error message. The cross-chain view lives on the parent rpc-capabilities benchmark; this page is the Avalanche-scoped answer with per-region breakdowns as a first-class dimension.
Frequently asked
What is the fastest free Avalanche RPC right now?
dRPC currently leads at 23 ms (`eth_blockNumber` p50 over the last 24h), measured against 6 no-key providers probed every 15 seconds from us-east, eu-west and Singapore. The leaderboard re-sorts continuously against fresh Prometheus samples, so the answer on this page is the answer right now, not a quarterly snapshot. Use the region tabs to see the leader from the origin closest to your deployment.
Which Avalanche RPCs work without an API key?
The 6 providers on this page: PublicNode, dRPC, 1RPC, Tenderly, Nodies, Avalanche. Every (provider, chain) pair was live-verified no-key before inclusion, and anything that key-gates, region-blocks or rate-limits below our 15-second cadence is excluded rather than listed with an asterisk.
Does the fastest Avalanche RPC change by region?
Frequently. The headline number averages three probe origins (us-east, eu-west, Singapore), but per-region leaders regularly diverge, a gateway that wins from Virginia can lose from Singapore by multiples. The region tabs at the top of the page re-scope every number on the page to a single origin; pick the one closest to where your requests actually originate.
How is Avalanche RPC latency measured here?
One identical JSON-RPC POST (`eth_blockNumber`) every 15 seconds against each provider from each of 3 regions, with the same plain HTTP client. Wall-clock round-trip is recorded at millisecond precision; p50/p90/p99 are computed via Prometheus `quantile_over_time` over 24 hours. Responses are classified (`ok` / `http_err` / `jsonrpc_err` / `stale` / `timeout`) so an endpoint stuck on an old head or returning errors behind HTTP 200 is never ranked as fastest. The harness is open source and every number on this page is a public Prometheus query you can run yourself.
Is the official Avalanche RPC good enough for production reads?
Among chain-official endpoints it is one of the strongest we measure: tight latency distribution and a high success rate rather than the best-effort tail seen on some other foundation RPCs. The usual free-tier caveats still apply (shared rate limits, no SLA), but as a read path it holds up unusually well against the commercial gateways.
Source code github.com/ChainBench/OpenChainBench/tree/main/harnesses/rpc-capabilities