Kusama RPC endpoints: free public URLs by latency
HTTP round-trip latency for chain_getHeader against every free, no-key public Kusama relay-chain endpoint, audited every 60 seconds from 3 regions.
TL;DR. As of , OnFinality has the lowest median latency of the 3 free public Kusama RPC endpoints measured, 48 ms (p50, 24h, 3 regions). Source: OpenChainBench, https://openchainbench.com/benchmarks/kusama-rpc. 3 public endpoints, no key: kusama.api.onfinality.io, kusama-rpc.publicnode.com, kusama.drpc.org. Full URLs with their 24h median are listed below.
Companion page
Comparing free RPC endpoints across every chain we measure? Open the cross-chain RPC matrix →
Kusama is Polkadot's canary network, a live production relay chain (KSM token) where new features ship before Polkadot mainnet. Substrate-based, ~6 s block time, same Substrate JSON-RPC wire protocol as Polkadot. 3 keyless endpoints are probed continuously, each listed with its URL in the endpoints table above.
Methodology
Kusama: 3 free public RPC endpoints answering `chain_getHeader` every 60 seconds from us-east, eu-west and Singapore, ranked by 24h median. OnFinality leads at 48 ms. We measure the round-trip latency of a single, identical JSON-RPC call (`chain_getHeader`) against every no-key public Kusama relay-chain endpoint that sustains continuous probing, 3 providers live today, every 60 seconds, from us-east, eu-west and Singapore. The harness classifies every response (ok / http_err / jsonrpc_err / stale / timeout) with a relay-chain-scaled staleness gap (40 blocks). The cross-chain view lives on the parent `rpc-capabilities` benchmark; this page is the Kusama-scoped answer with per-region breakdowns as a first-class dimension.
Results: 3 free public Kusama RPC endpoints ranked by p50 latency (24h, 3 regions)
| № | Providers | p50 | p90 | p99 | Success |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | OnFinality | 48 ms | 152 ms | 1.21 s | 100.00% |
| 2 | PublicNode | 59 ms | 77 ms | 492 ms | 99.98% |
| 3 | dRPC | 446 ms | 495 ms | 569 ms | 98.80% |
Public Kusama RPC endpoints measured
The 3 no-key endpoints answering our probes today, with their current 24h median. Paste one into a wallet or a client as is: no signup, no key. Private providers (API key) are never listed with a URL.
OnFinalityhttps://kusama.api.onfinality.io/public48 ms100.0%
PublicNodehttps://kusama-rpc.publicnode.com59 ms100.0%
dRPChttps://kusama.drpc.org446 ms98.8%
Median round-trip and success rate over the last 24 hours across the probe regions; the ranked table above carries p90, p99 and the per-region split.
Source code github.com/ChainBench/OpenChainBench/tree/main/harnesses/rpc-capabilities