Fastest free Optimism RPC, live no-key endpoint latency
HTTP round-trip latency for eth_blockNumber against every free, no-key public Optimism RPC endpoint, audited every 15 seconds from 3 regions.
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 (PublicNode, dRPC, Tenderly, 1RPC, Nodies) competes on tighter distributions. Probes run every 15 seconds from three regions with full response classification, so an endpoint stuck on an old head is flagged `stale` rather than ranked fast.
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 Optimism endpoint that sustains continuous probing, 6 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 Optimism-scoped answer with per-region breakdowns as a first-class dimension.
Frequently asked
What is the fastest free Optimism RPC right now?
dRPC currently leads at 23 ms (`eth_blockNumber` p50 over the last 24h), measured against 6 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 Optimism RPCs work without an API key?
The 6 providers on this page: PublicNode, dRPC, 1RPC, Tenderly, Nodies, Optimism. 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 Optimism 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 Optimism 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.
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