RPCsUpdated

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, 52 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 52 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.

  • Cadence: every 60 seconds per provider, from each of 3 probe regions (us-east Virginia, eu-west Amsterdam, sgp Singapore). Headline p50/p90/p99 aggregate across all 3 regions via Prometheus `avg(quantile_over_time(...))`; per-region breakdowns are first-class on this page via the region tabs.
  • Payload: `{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":<rotating>,"method":"chain_getHeader","params":[]}`. Plain HTTP POST, identical for every endpoint, no API key in any request.
  • Latency measurement, call-result classification (`ok`, `http_err`, `jsonrpc_err`, `stale`, `timeout`) and the archive-depth audit follow the cluster method documented on [rpc-capabilities](openchainbench.com/benchmarks/rpc-capabilities#methodology); this page is the Kusama-scoped view of the same harness, with the same exclusion rules.
  • Chain scope: every query on this page is pinned to `chain="kusama"`. Provider coverage today: 3 no-key endpoints.

Results: 3 free public Kusama RPC endpoints ranked by p50 latency (24h, 3 regions)

Kusama RPC endpoints: free public URLs by latency: RPC latency per provider (p50, 24h).
№Providersp50p90p99Success
1OnFinalitySubstrate-native public gateway, Web3 Foundation grantee52 ms250 ms1.09 s100.00% (n=4319)
2PublicNodeAllnodes-operated multi-chain gateway including Substrate93 ms143 ms349 ms100.00% (n=4322)
3dRPCdRPC public gateway for Kusama relay chain441 ms539 ms711 ms99.33% (n=4321)

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.

  • OnFinality logoOnFinalityhttps://kusama.api.onfinality.io/public52 ms100.0%
  • PublicNode logoPublicNodehttps://kusama-rpc.publicnode.com93 ms100.0%
  • dRPC logodRPChttps://kusama.drpc.org441 ms99.3%

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