Fastest free Stellar Soroban RPC, live no-key endpoint latency
HTTP round-trip latency for getLatestLedger against every free, no-key public Stellar Soroban RPC endpoint, audited every 60 seconds from 3 regions.
TL;DR. As of , Gateway.fm leads rpc latency at 271 ms (p50, 24h) on Fastest free Stellar Soroban RPC, live no-key endpoint latency. Source: OpenChainBench, https://openchainbench.com/benchmarks/stellar-rpc.
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Comparing free RPC endpoints across every chain we measure? Open the cross-chain RPC matrix →
Stellar uses the Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP) with roughly 5-second ledger closes and deterministic finality on every close. Soroban is Stellar's smart contract platform with a dedicated JSON-RPC interface. Free public Soroban RPC endpoints are available without an API key from Gateway.fm, Ankr, OnFinality, SorobanRPC.com and Lightsail Network. Every provider was live-verified with consecutive keyless getLatestLedger probes at launch.
Methodology
Per-chain member of the RPC latency cluster, extended to Stellar Soroban. We measure the round-trip latency of a single, identical JSON-RPC call (getLatestLedger) against every no-key public Stellar Soroban endpoint that sustains continuous probing: 5 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 Stellar-scaled staleness gap (roughly 5 s per ledger). The cross-chain view lives on the parent rpc-capabilities benchmark; this page is the Stellar-scoped answer with per-region breakdowns as a first-class dimension.
Frequently asked
What is the fastest free Stellar Soroban RPC right now?
Gateway.fm currently leads at 271 ms (getLatestLedger 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.
Which Stellar Soroban RPCs work without an API key?
5 endpoints sustain continuous keyless probing at launch: Gateway.fm, Ankr, OnFinality, SorobanRPC.com and Lightsail Network. Every listed endpoint was live-verified with a getLatestLedger POST returning a parsable ledger sequence before inclusion.
What is the difference between Stellar Horizon and Soroban RPC?
Horizon is Stellar's REST API for classic payments and account operations. Soroban RPC is the JSON-RPC interface for Stellar's smart contract platform. This benchmark measures Soroban RPC endpoints since they are the primary interface for dApp developers building on Stellar.
How is Stellar Soroban RPC latency measured here, technically?
One identical getLatestLedger POST 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. Responses are classified (ok / http_err / jsonrpc_err / stale / timeout) so an endpoint stuck on an old ledger or returning errors is never ranked as fastest.
Source code github.com/ChainBench/OpenChainBench/tree/main/harnesses/rpc-capabilities