Fastest free Ethereum RPC, live no-key endpoint latency
HTTP round-trip latency for eth_blockNumber against every free, no-key public Ethereum RPC endpoint, audited every 15 seconds from 3 regions.
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Comparing free RPC endpoints across every chain we measure? Open the cross-chain RPC matrix →
Ethereum carries the largest free-RPC cohort we measure: 9 no-key providers answering the same `eth_blockNumber` probe every 15 seconds from three regions. It is also the chain where reliability analysis earns its keep. Cloudflare-eth answers HTTP 200 in well under a second while an increasing share of calls resolve to a JSON-RPC error body (`-32046 Cannot fulfill request`), and Merkle is excluded outright after recurring Cloudflare lockouts that froze our probes for 20 minutes after a single request. If you paste a free RPC URL into an Ethereum dapp, this page is the live answer to which one deserves it.
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 Ethereum endpoint that sustains continuous probing, 9 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 Ethereum-scoped answer with per-region breakdowns as a first-class dimension.
Frequently asked
What is the fastest free Ethereum RPC right now?
Cloudflare currently leads at 19 ms (`eth_blockNumber` p50 over the last 24h), measured against 9 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 Ethereum RPCs work without an API key?
The 9 providers on this page: PublicNode, dRPC, 1RPC, Tenderly, Nodies, Lava, MeowRPC, Flashbots, Cloudflare. 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 Ethereum 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 Ethereum 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.
Why is Cloudflare's Ethereum RPC marked unreliable here?
Cloudflare's public Ethereum gateway switched to a permissioned mode for many JSON-RPC methods. The endpoint still responds fast with HTTP 200, but the body is increasingly a JSON-RPC error (`-32046`) rather than a usable result. We classify a call as `ok` only when the HTTP status is 200 AND the body carries a usable `result` field, so Cloudflare's real success rate is visible in the reliability column instead of hiding behind fast error responses.
Source code github.com/ChainBench/OpenChainBench/tree/main/harnesses/rpc-capabilities