Optimism RPC endpoints: free public URLs by latency
HTTP round-trip latency for eth_getBlockByNumber against every free, no-key public Optimism RPC endpoint, audited every 60 seconds from 3 regions.
TL;DR. As of , PublicNode has the lowest median latency of the 5 free public Optimism RPC endpoints measured, 70 ms (p50, 24h, 3 regions). Source: OpenChainBench, https://openchainbench.com/benchmarks/optimism-rpc. Chain ID 10. 5 public endpoints, no key: optimism-rpc.publicnode.com, optimism.drpc.org, gateway.tenderly.co, op-pokt.nodies.app, mainnet.optimism.io. 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 →
Optimism pits the Foundation's `mainnet.optimism.io` against 5 multi-chain no-key gateways. As on Arbitrum, the official endpoint is documented best-effort, and the measured tail confirms it, while the gateway tier competes on tighter distributions. Probes run every 60 seconds from three regions with full response classification, so an endpoint stuck on an old head is flagged `stale` rather than ranked fast.
Methodology
Optimism: 5 free public RPC endpoints answering `eth_getBlockByNumber` every 60 seconds from us-east, eu-west and Singapore, ranked by 24h median. PublicNode leads at 70 ms; the chain-official endpoint measures 167 ms. We measure the round-trip latency of a single, identical RPC call (`eth_getBlockByNumber`) against every no-key public Optimism endpoint that sustains continuous probing, 5 providers, every 60 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 Optimism-scoped answer with per-region breakdowns as a first-class dimension.
Results: 5 free public Optimism RPC endpoints ranked by p50 latency (24h, 3 regions)
| № | Providers | p50 | p90 | p99 | Success |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | PublicNode | 70 ms | 83 ms | 676 ms | 99.77% |
| 2 | dRPC | 81 ms | 112 ms | 199 ms | 81.07% |
| 3 | Tenderly | 103 ms | 109 ms | 117 ms | 100.00% |
| 4 | Nodies | 141 ms | 153 ms | 239 ms | 100.00% |
| 5 | Optimism | 167 ms | 197 ms | 394 ms | 100.00% |
Public Optimism RPC endpoints measured
Chain ID 10, currency ETH. The 5 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.
PublicNodehttps://optimism-rpc.publicnode.com70 ms99.8%
dRPChttps://optimism.drpc.org81 ms81.1%
Tenderlyhttps://gateway.tenderly.co/public/optimism103 ms100.0%
Nodieshttps://op-pokt.nodies.app141 ms100.0%
Optimismhttps://mainnet.optimism.io167 ms100.0%
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.
Not listed on Optimism
- Ankr: public endpoint requires an API key
- NodeReal: requires an API key
- GetBlock: requires an API key; compared on the keyed pages
- Chainstack: requires an API key; compared on the keyed pages
- 1RPC: delisted for reliability: under 13 % success at one probe per minute (since 2026-07-09)
- gateway.fm: 29 requests per IP budget, too small for continuous probing
- LlamaRPC: Cloudflare 521 from the probe regions
- BlockPI: Cloudflare 521 from the probe regions
- OmniaTech: Cloudflare 521 from the probe regions
- Alchemy demo: rate-limited public demo endpoint; the keyed tier is compared on the keyed pages
Frequently asked
Which Optimism RPCs work without an API key?
The 5 providers on this page are listed with their URLs in the endpoints table above. Every (provider, chain) pair was live-verified no-key before inclusion, and anything that key-gates, region-blocks or rate-limits below our 60-second cadence is excluded rather than listed with an asterisk.
Do Base and Optimism RPCs perform the same since both are OP Stack?
No. The stack is shared but the infrastructure is not: different operators, different peering, different gateway coverage. Our measurements regularly show different leaders and different tail behavior on the two chains. If you deploy on both, pick the RPC per chain from each page rather than assuming OP Stack parity.
Source code github.com/ChainBench/OpenChainBench/tree/main/harnesses/rpc-capabilities