Fastest free public RPC for Ethereum, BNB, Polygon and 7 more EVM chains
RPCsArbitrum
Trails245 ms
- p99
- 357 ms
- rank
- #7
- samples
- 8,641
Merkle
Leads242 ms
- p99
- 581 ms
- rank
- #6
- samples
- 17,279
Arbitrum vs Merkle
Arbitrum leads on 0 of 1 shared benchmarks, Merkle on 1. Merkle wins on Fastest free public RPC for Ethereum, BNB, Polygon and 7 more EVM chains (242 ms vs 245 ms).
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.
Merkle
Merkle exposes per-chain RPC subdomains (`eth.merkle.io`, `base.merkle.io`, `bsc.merkle.io`). Stable on Base + BSC for no-key benchmarking; Ethereum is fronted by an aggressive Cloudflare bot filter (20-minute lockout after a single request) so we exclude it from the leaderboard.
Side by side measurements
How this pair was selected
A pair is published when all four conditions hold. Both providers run in the same OpenChainBench benchmark for at least seven consecutive days. Each provider has at least 1000 samples in the measurement window. The head to head query has observable third party search demand. Both providers have a public /products/[slug] page on OCB. The full pair ledger is versioned in the public repo so the methodology is externally verifiable.