Cloudflare vs Merkle

Side by side OpenChainBench measurements. Identical layout, no editorial verdict, the live data leads. Each panel surfaces the aggregate plus the chain and region breakdowns when the underlying bench exposes them, straight from the Prometheus queries that drive the parent benchmark pages.

Read methodology Last measured Wed, 01 Jul 2026 15:08:11 UTCWindow: rolling 24h1 shared benchmark

Cloudflare

Cloudflare's public Ethereum gateway. Recently switched to a permissioned mode for many JSON-RPC methods, returning `-32046 Cannot fulfill request` for most endpoints.

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 public RPC for Ethereum, BNB, Polygon and 7 more EVM chains

RPCs

Cloudflare

Leads

31 ms

p99: 81 ms
rank: #2
samples: 8,640

Merkle

Trails

117 ms

p99: 368 ms
rank: #6
samples: 17,279

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.