Fastest free NEAR RPC, live no-key endpoint latency
HTTP round-trip latency for block (finality=final) against every available public NEAR Protocol node, audited every 60 seconds from 3 regions.
TL;DR. As of , FastNEAR leads rpc latency at 23 ms (p50, 24h) on Fastest free NEAR RPC, live no-key endpoint latency. Source: OpenChainBench, https://openchainbench.com/benchmarks/near-rpc.
Companion page
Comparing free RPC endpoints across every chain we measure? Open the cross-chain RPC matrix →
NEAR Protocol is a sharded Proof-of-Stake L1 blockchain using Nightshade sharding and Doomslug consensus, targeting roughly one block per second with near-instant practical finality. Public JSON-RPC endpoints are available without an API key from the NEAR Foundation, FastNEAR, Lava Network and dRPC. Every provider was live-verified with consecutive block/finality:final probes at launch.
Methodology
Per-chain member of the RPC latency cluster, extended to NEAR Protocol. We measure the round-trip latency of a single JSON-RPC call (block with finality=final) against every available public NEAR node that sustains continuous probing: 4 providers at launch, every 60 seconds, from us-east, eu-west and Singapore. The harness classifies every response (ok / http_err / jsonrpc_err / stale / timeout) with a NEAR-scaled staleness gap (300 blocks, around 5 min). The cross-chain view lives on the parent rpc-capabilities benchmark; this page is the NEAR-scoped answer with per-region breakdowns as a first-class dimension.
Frequently asked
What is the fastest free NEAR Protocol RPC right now?
FastNEAR currently leads at 23 ms (NEAR block height p50 over the last 24h), measured against 4 providers probed every 60 seconds from us-east, eu-west and Singapore. The leaderboard re-sorts continuously against fresh Prometheus samples.
Which NEAR RPC endpoints work without an API key?
4 endpoints sustain continuous keyless probing at launch: NEAR Foundation (rpc.mainnet.near.org), FastNEAR (free.rpc.fastnear.com), Lava (near.lava.build) and dRPC (near.drpc.org). Every listed endpoint was live-verified with a block/finality:final call returning a parsable height before inclusion.
Does the fastest NEAR RPC change by region?
Often. Public infra concentrates in specific regions; a gateway that wins from Amsterdam can lose from Singapore by multiples. The region tabs at the top of the page re-scope every number to a single origin.
How is NEAR RPC latency measured here, technically?
One block/finality:final JSON-RPC call every 60 seconds against each provider from each of 3 regions. Wall-clock round-trip is recorded at millisecond precision; p50/p90/p99 are computed via Prometheus quantile_over_time over 24 hours. Best-effort measurements; p50 is the median, p90 the 90th percentile and p99 the 99th percentile of latency samples collected over the last 24 hours.
Source code github.com/ChainBench/OpenChainBench/tree/main/harnesses/rpc-capabilities