Fastest free public RPC for Ethereum, BNB, Polygon and 7 more EVM chains
RPCsBase
Trails261 ms
- p99
- 1.23 s
- rank
- #8
- samples
- 8,638
Merkle
Leads242 ms
- p99
- 581 ms
- rank
- #6
- samples
- 17,279
Base vs Merkle
Base leads on 0 of 2 shared benchmarks, Merkle on 2. Merkle wins on Fastest free public RPC for Ethereum, BNB, Polygon and 7 more EVM chains (242 ms vs 261 ms), Fastest free Base RPC, live no-key endpoint latency (242 ms vs 261 ms).
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.
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
Fastest free Base RPC, live no-key endpoint latency
RPCsBase
Trails261 ms
- p99
- 1.23 s
- rank
- #5
- samples
- 8,638
Merkle
Leads242 ms
- p99
- 574 ms
- rank
- #3
- samples
- 8,638
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.