Fastest free BNB Chain RPC, live no-key endpoint latency
HTTP round-trip latency for eth_blockNumber against every free, no-key public BNB Chain 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 →
BNB Chain is the incumbent's chain: Binance's `bsc-dataseed1.binance.org` has been the copy-paste default since 2020, and from some regions it is still the single fastest RPC response we measure anywhere in the cluster. The catch is that it serves exactly one chain, while PublicNode, dRPC, Nodies and Merkle bring multi-chain coverage with increasingly competitive latency from EU origins. 5 providers, identical probes, three regions.
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 BNB Chain endpoint that sustains continuous probing, 5 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 BNB Chain-scoped answer with per-region breakdowns as a first-class dimension.
Frequently asked
What is the fastest free BNB Chain RPC right now?
dRPC currently leads at 22 ms (`eth_blockNumber` p50 over the last 24h), measured against 5 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 BNB Chain RPCs work without an API key?
The 5 providers on this page: PublicNode, dRPC, Nodies, Merkle, Binance. 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 BNB Chain 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 BNB Chain 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 bsc-dataseed still the best RPC for BNB Chain?
It depends entirely on where your requests originate. From regions near Binance's infrastructure the dataseed is often the fastest single response in our whole dataset; from Singapore it can be 10x slower than the gateway tier. Check the region tabs above, the cross-region average is meaningless for an endpoint with this much geographic variance.
Source code github.com/ChainBench/OpenChainBench/tree/main/harnesses/rpc-capabilities