OpenChainBench

Arbitrum vs Base

Arbitrum leads on 6 of 8 shared benchmarks, Base on 2. Arbitrum wins on Fastest L2 block time, live across Robinhood, Arbitrum, Base and 7 more (338 ms vs 1.93 s), Fastest free public RPC for Ethereum, BNB, Polygon and 23 more chains (249 ms vs 257 ms), Fastest Wormhole VAA finalization by source chain, live latency (16.3 min vs 19.8 min), Fastest Chainlink CCIP source chain by end-to-end delivery latency (18.4 min vs 24.2 min). Base wins on Cheapest blockchain transaction fee, live across 15 L1 and L2 chains ($0.000240 vs $0.000801), Most reliable free public RPC, correctness incidents across 7 EVM chains (1 vs 2).

Read methodology Last measured Window: rolling 24h8 shared benchmarks
Arbitrum logo
Arbitrum

Optimistic rollup built on Nitro stack with a fast-finality sequencer. Sub-second block times (~250 ms) via a 250 ms default block interval, far below the 2 s OP Stack convention. 7-day fraud-proof window for L1 finality.

Base logo
Base

Coinbase-operated optimistic rollup on the OP Stack. 2-second sequencer block time, shared bridge with Optimism via the OP Superchain, fastest-growing L2 by TVL since 2024.

Side by side measurements

Fastest free public RPC for Ethereum, BNB, Polygon and 23 more chains (plus Solana and Polkadot)

RPCs

Arbitrum

Leads

249 ms

p99
506 ms
rank
#6
samples
4,329

Base

Trails

257 ms

p99
895 ms
rank
#7
samples
4,331

Latency is conditional on success: the harness times only calls returning a valid fresh block, so a mostly-failing endpoint can post a fast p50. Rows below 50 percent success are degraded; unresponsive probes pin below the table. The All chains aggregate favours single-chain foundation endpoints (Base, Binance, Arbitrum, Optimism, Avalanche officials) since they rank on one chain only; use a chain tab for honest comparison. Dead endpoints (cloudflare-eth POST returns -32603) are excluded.

Most reliable free public RPC, correctness incidents across 7 EVM chains

RPCs

Arbitrum

Trails

2

rank
#2
samples
86provisional

Base

Leads

1

rank
#1
samples
76provisional

A zero row means no incident was caught in the window, not a proof of correctness. Most providers post zero most days; this bench exists for the days they do not, and for the errors: a blocked eth_getLogs or a balance read gated behind a paid key at 40 blocks of depth counts as an incident because it is one from the caller's seat.

Rolling 24h · Reliability incidentsRaw JSON

Frequently asked questions

Arbitrum vs Base: which one is better?

Arbitrum and Base are compared on 8 shared OpenChainBench benchmarks. Arbitrum leads on Fastest L2 block time, live across Robinhood, Arbitrum, Base and 7 more. Base leads on Cheapest blockchain transaction fee, live across 15 L1 and L2 chains. See the live table on this page for every metric.

Which is faster, Arbitrum or Base?

On the Fastest L2 block time, live across Robinhood, Arbitrum, Base and 7 more benchmark, Arbitrum leads at 338 ms versus Base at 1.93 s. Live measurement is updated continuously by the OpenChainBench harness.

Which is cheaper, Arbitrum or Base?

On the Cheapest blockchain transaction fee, live across 15 L1 and L2 chains benchmark, Base leads at $0.000240 versus Arbitrum at $0.000801. Live measurement is updated continuously by the OpenChainBench harness.

How is the Arbitrum vs Base comparison measured?

Every benchmark on this page uses the same open methodology, published at https://openchainbench.com/methodology. Data is CC-BY-4.0. Measurement harnesses are MIT-licensed.

Related comparisons

How this pair was selected

Auto-generated pairs require: both providers in the same benchmark for seven consecutive days, at least 1000 samples per provider, observable third-party search demand, and a public /products/[slug] page on OCB. Editorially curated pairs (like this one) may publish early when search demand is high and data is accruing — panels with fewer than 100 samples are shown as provisional. The full pair ledger is versioned in the public repo.

Live data refreshes via ISR within 60 seconds of a new run. Sources are the same Prometheus queries surfaced on the parent benchmark pages.