Lava 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 15:14:11 UTCWindow: rolling 24h1 shared benchmark

Lava

Lava Network is a decentralized RPC mesh with permissionless validators. Public no-key endpoints work for Ethereum (`eth1.lava.build`) and Arbitrum (`arb1.lava.build`); other chains require an account-issued key.

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

Lava

Trails

141 ms

p99: 1.49 s
rank: #12
samples: 17,280

Merkle

Leads

117 ms

p99: 370 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.