Fastest free Osmosis RPC, live no-key endpoint latency

Polkachu currently leads at 188 ms (Tendermint `status` p50 over the last 24h), measured against 5 no-key providers probed every 60 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.

Five endpoints sustain continuous keyless probing at launch: Osmosis Foundation's `rpc.osmosis.zone`, Polkachu (`osmosis-rpc.polkachu.com`), PublicNode / Allnodes (`osmosis-rpc.publicnode.com`), Imperator (`rpc-osmosis.imperator.co`) and LavenderFive (`rpc.lavenderfive.com/osmosis`). Every listed endpoint was live-verified with a `status` POST returning a parsable decimal `sync_info.latest_block_height` before inclusion. Excluded by the audit: Lava's `osmosis.tendermintrpc.lava.build` returned 403 without a key, OnFinality's public osmosis gateway kept timing out at probe cadence, Numia rejected without an API key (401), Ankr and Chainstack require paid Cosmos tiers, and several community-run endpoints (BlockApsis, WhisperNode, Enigma-Validator, StakeTown, reece.sh) returned connect errors during the sweep.

Often. Cosmos public infra is heavily weighted toward validator ops in specific regions; a gateway that wins from Amsterdam can lose from Singapore by multiples, especially for community-run providers with a single data centre. 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.

One identical Tendermint JSON-RPC POST (`status`) every 60 seconds against each provider from each of 3 regions, using the same plain HTTP client the EVM and Substrate clusters use. The response is a `result` object containing a `sync_info` block; the harness reads `sync_info.latest_block_height` (a decimal string on Cosmos SDK, unlike EVM / Substrate which hex-encode) and parses it with `strconv.ParseUint`. 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.

Two reasons. First, Tendermint `status` returns `sync_info.latest_block_height` on every Cosmos SDK chain in a shape the cluster's cross-provider tip machinery understands without a chain-specific code path. Second, `abci_info` returns application-level metadata that a polite CDN can synthesise without touching the underlying node, defeating the point of a latency probe on the RPC path; `block` requires a height parameter and would either bias toward providers with a fast archive path or duplicate the head-block work `status` already does. `status` forces the endpoint to actually read the head from the consensus engine, which is what integrators care about.

Cosmos SDK chains access historical state via ABCI queries keyed on module + KV-store, which has no chain-agnostic depth analog for the EVM `eth_getBalance(address, height)` probe the cluster uses on other chains. Hash quorum (bench 083 cross-provider height-hash agreement) is technically feasible on Cosmos because `latest_block_hash` in the `status` response corresponds to the same block the height is reported for, but the initial Osmosis add-on ships without it to keep the reliability change surface small; the hash normalisation across Cosmos chains will be validated before wiring the quorum path here. Both columns are omitted honestly rather than filled with a proxy that would misrepresent the chain.