Ethereum RPC Provider Benchmark: Latency & Uptime (October 2026)

By Chainstack Labs Research Team · Research Note No. 050 · October 2026 edition · Published Oct 8, 2026 · Last updated Oct 8, 2026 · Node infrastructure

Data source: Chainstack Compare, backed by a public Grafana dashboard. Seven-day rolling window across DE, US, and SG, snapshot captured Oct 8, 2026.

Disclosure. Chainstack operates the monitoring service, the dashboard, and the scoring formula behind this report, and Chainstack is one of the four providers ranked. Section 2 documents the pipeline so readers can check the work, and the collection code is open source.

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Abstract

Ethereum has the deepest bench of RPC providers of any chain, which makes it the hardest place to separate marketing from measurement. This report ranks Chainstack, Quicknode, Alchemy, and dRPC on Ethereum RPC latency and uptime over a 7-day window ending Oct 8, 2026, using the scoring method behind Chainstack Compare: response time and success rate are combined per region, and the three regions (DE, US, and SG) are averaged equally. Chainstack ranks first, but the lead depends on region.

Keywords: Ethereum RPC provider, Ethereum RPC latency, RPC benchmark, regional latency, availability, composite scoring, tail latency, methodology

Key findings

• Chainstack ranks first with a score of 0.079 and the lowest P50 (36 ms), P95 (78 ms), and P99 (117 ms) in the set.
• Second place is 23% higher. Quicknode scores 0.097 and Alchemy 0.114. Ethereum has the narrowest first-to-second gap of the four chains in this series.
• US traffic is served faster by competitors. Alchemy (80 ms) and Quicknode (98 ms) post a lower US P95 than Chainstack (143 ms).
• dRPC scores 0.670, 8.5 times Chainstack’s. Its US (875 ms) and SG (895 ms) P95 are almost six times its DE figure (153 ms).
• Quicknode’s score nearly halved since September (0.178 to 0.097), moving it from third to second.

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Contents

1. Introduction
2. Methodology and scoring
3. Providers and regions
4. Results
5. Regional variance and outliers
6. Changes since September
7. Interpretation notes and known confounders
8. Conclusion
9. Frequently asked questions
10. Appendix A: measurement parameters

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1. Introduction

A decade of competition has narrowed median latency between top Ethereum RPC providers to a few milliseconds in a well-served region. That is exactly why a single global average is least useful here: the vendors that survive are all competent on average, and what separates them is how they behave in their worst region and at the tail. This report ranks four Ethereum RPC providers on that basis and publishes the regional detail that a blended figure would average away.

Ethereum also raises the cost of a bad tail. A latency event on a thin chain affects a handful of early integrators; on Ethereum it can sit behind a trading system, a wallet backend, or an indexer serving thousands of users.

2. Methodology and scoring

2.1 Monitoring infrastructure

A Python service running on Vercel serverless functions sends RPC requests to each monitored provider every 1–3 minutes from three regions and records each request’s response time and outcome. The results feed a public Grafana dashboard, which also powers Chainstack Compare. Regions are labeled by country code: DE, US, and SG. Because probes originate from cloud regions, the benchmark measures latency between each provider and those regions, not the latency an end user on a home or mobile connection would see.

2.2 What is requested and what counts as a failure

All requests use the latest block, except methods marked with an hourglass (⌛) on the dashboard. These “archive” methods query historical blocks one to two days old, which exercises a provider’s historical-state path rather than its tip-of-chain path. A response that takes longer than 55 seconds is treated as a failure, not as a very slow success, and is excluded from the latency charts. Per-method breakdowns are available in Grafana; this report uses the summary view.

2.3 Plan monitored

Unless a different plan is specified, each provider is monitored on its first paid RPC plan, named Growth as a rule. The results describe each provider’s entry paid tier. Dedicated, enterprise, and other higher tiers are not covered, and rate limits or routing that differ by plan may affect both latency and success rate.

2.4 Scoring formula

The dashboard ranks providers on speed (response time) and reliability (success rate). Lower is better.

Score = 1 / ((1 / ResponseTime) × (SuccessRate³))      = ResponseTime / SuccessRate³

The score is built in four steps:

1. Latency term. For each region, take each method’s p95 and combine them as an arithmetic mean with equal weight per method. eth_subscribe is excluded from this average because its latency reflects chain block cadence, not provider speed.
2. Success-rate term. For each region, compute the success rate using sample counts as weights. eth_subscribe still counts toward this term.
3. Per-region score. Divide the latency term by the success rate cubed. Response time is in seconds, so a latency term of 0.079 means 79 ms.
4. Final score. Take the arithmetic mean of the regional scores. Every region carries equal weight, so one slow region cannot be hidden by fast ones.

2.5 How much the success-rate cube matters

Cubing the success rate makes small reliability drops visible, but at the availability levels measured on Ethereum the effect is small.

Success rate	Score multiplier
100.00%	1.000×
99.90%	1.003×
99.50%	1.015×
99.00%	1.031×
97.00%	1.096×
95.00%	1.166×

Availability on Ethereum ranges from 99.96% to 99.98%, a multiplier of 1.001× or less. Score differences between providers here are driven almost entirely by latency. Success rate becomes a dominant term only well below 99%.

2.6 Reading the dashboard columns on Ethereum

The P95 column is the mean of the three regional P95 values. Chainstack (47, 143, and 42 ms) averages 77.3 ms against 78 shown; Quicknode (40, 98, 138) averages 92.0 against 92; Alchemy (64, 80, 164) averages 102.7 against 103; dRPC (153, 875, 895) averages 641.0 against 641.

The score is not a simple function of that column. On Ethereum, scores run 2% to 11% above mean P95 divided by availability cubed (Alchemy: 0.114 against roughly 0.103), because the score averages each method’s own p95 while the percentile columns summarize a different aggregation. Rank order is identical under both measures, so the ranking does not depend on that choice. Treat the score as the ranking authority and the percentile columns as context.

2.7 Time window, limits, and independence

The dashboard is live, refreshes every 3 minutes, and offers 24-hour and 7-day views. Every figure here comes from the 7-day view captured on Oct 8, 2026. The benchmark does not measure end-user latency, throughput under load, response correctness, cost, or tiers above the entry paid plan. Chainstack chose the formula (p95, success rate cubed, equal regional weights) and operates the probes, so a different formula could reorder close pairs.

3. Providers and regions

Four providers with public Ethereum mainnet RPC endpoints are monitored: Chainstack, Quicknode, Alchemy, and dRPC. Each is probed concurrently from DE, US, and SG over the same rolling 7-day window, on its first paid plan. To build on Ethereum with Chainstack, see the Chainstack Ethereum page.

4. Results

Table 1. Ethereum, 7-day window, Oct 8, 2026. Chainstack leads on score and on all three percentile columns; dRPC’s score is 8.5 times Chainstack’s, driven by two regions above 850 ms.

Provider	Score	Availability	P50	P95	P99	DE	US	SG
Chainstack	0.079	99.98%	36ms	78ms	117ms	47ms	143ms	42ms
Quicknode	0.097	99.98%	40ms	92ms	142ms	40ms	98ms	138ms
Alchemy	0.114	99.98%	38ms	103ms	188ms	64ms	80ms	164ms
dRPC	0.670	99.96%	56ms	641ms	1,950ms	153ms	875ms	895ms

Ethereum has the narrowest gap between first and second place on any of the four chains in this series: Quicknode’s score is 23% higher than Chainstack’s. The first three providers tie on availability at 99.98%, so their ordering is a latency result.

5. Regional variance and outliers

Chainstack’s lead comes from low levels, not from the flattest profile. Its best-to-worst-region ratio is 3.4× (42 ms in SG, 143 ms in US), close to Quicknode’s 3.5× (40 ms in DE, 138 ms in SG) and wider than Alchemy’s 2.6× (64 ms in DE, 164 ms in SG). What puts Chainstack first is that its SG figure (42 ms) is the lowest in the set and its DE figure (47 ms) is second only to Quicknode’s 40 ms.

US traffic is where the ranking inverts. Alchemy (80 ms) and Quicknode (98 ms) both beat Chainstack (143 ms), and Chainstack’s US cell is its highest regional figure in this report. A team serving mainly US users on Ethereum should read the US column before the headline score.

dRPC is degraded in two regions. Its DE P95 (153 ms) sits in the same range as the weakest cells of the other three providers (138–164 ms), but its US (875 ms) and SG (895 ms) figures are almost six times higher than DE. Those two cells account for most of its 1,950 ms P99 and its 0.670 score.

Table 2. Lowest P95 by region on Ethereum.

Region	Lowest P95
DE	Quicknode (40 ms)
US	Alchemy (80 ms)
SG	Chainstack (42 ms)

6. Changes since September

The September 2026 edition of this report covered the same four providers on Ethereum. Table 3 compares its figures with this month’s.

Table 3. Ethereum, September snapshot (late Sep 2026) to October snapshot (Oct 8, 2026). Lower is better.

Provider	Score	P95 (global)	Worst region P95
Chainstack	0.086 → 0.079	86 → 78 ms	US 160 → US 143 ms
Quicknode	0.178 → 0.097	173 → 92 ms	SG 224 → SG 138 ms
Alchemy	0.123 → 0.114	123 → 103 ms	SG 186 → SG 164 ms
dRPC	0.541 → 0.670	576 → 641 ms	US 1,360 → SG 895 ms

Three of the four providers improved in every region. Quicknode’s change is the largest: DE fell from 123 ms to 40 ms, US from 171 ms to 98 ms, and SG from 224 ms to 138 ms, moving it from third to second place.

dRPC’s September outlier did not go away; it changed shape. In September a single US cell (1,360 ms) pulled the score up while DE (127 ms) and SG (241 ms) were competitive. In October the US cell fell to 875 ms but SG rose to 895 ms, and the P99 grew from 1,370 ms to 1,950 ms. Each snapshot is one 7-day window, so this shows two points in time, not a trend.

7. Interpretation notes and known confounders

Entry paid plan only. Higher tiers, including dedicated infrastructure placed near a weak region, could change a provider’s regional profile and are not tested.

Probes are synthetic and regional. Requests come from serverless functions in three cloud regions. A team whose users sit elsewhere should treat the nearest region as a proxy and verify with its own probes.

Method mix is summarized, not shown. Headline numbers average across methods with equal weights. Methods differ widely in cost, so a workload concentrated in one heavy method such as eth_getLogs may rank providers differently. Per-method values are in Grafana.

Single window. Both the October figures and the September comparison rest on a single 7-day window each. Whether dRPC’s US and SG degradation persists is something the next edition can show.

8. Conclusion

On Ethereum, Chainstack posts the lowest score, the lowest P50, P95, and P99, and the lowest SG latency in the set, with Quicknode a clear second after a large September-to-October improvement. The result depends on region: US-origin traffic is served faster by Alchemy and Quicknode than by Chainstack, and dRPC is a poor fit for any workload that touches its US or SG cells. Teams choosing an RPC provider for Ethereum should pick the region closest to their users, read that column in Table 1 first, and check P99 if their workload is sensitive to tail latency.

9. Frequently asked questions

Which RPC provider has the lowest latency on Ethereum?

Chainstack, on the 7-day window ending Oct 8, 2026. It scores 0.079 with a global P95 of 78 ms, against 92 ms for Quicknode, 103 ms for Alchemy, and 641 ms for dRPC.

Which provider is fastest for US traffic on Ethereum?

Alchemy, with a US P95 of 80 ms, followed by Quicknode (98 ms) and Chainstack (143 ms). Chainstack leads in SG (42 ms) and is second to Quicknode in DE.

How is the score calculated?

Score is response time divided by success rate cubed. It is computed per region from the mean of each method’s p95, then averaged across DE, US, and SG. Lower is better (Section 2.4).

Appendix A: measurement parameters

Parameter	Value
Chain	Ethereum mainnet
Providers	Chainstack, Quicknode, Alchemy, dRPC
Plan monitored	First paid RPC plan per provider (Growth as a rule)
Regions	DE, US, SG
Probe infrastructure	Python service on Vercel serverless functions
Probe cadence	Every 1–3 minutes per region
Request target	Latest block; archive methods (⌛) query blocks 1–2 days old
Failure threshold	Responses over 55 seconds count as failures
Latency term	Mean of per-method p95, equal method weights, eth_subscribe excluded
Success-rate term	Sample-count weighted, eth_subscribe included
Score formula	ResponseTime / SuccessRate³ per region, then arithmetic mean across regions
Time window	Rolling 7 days; dashboard refreshes every 3 minutes
Snapshot date	Oct 8, 2026
Source	Chainstack Compare, public Grafana dashboard
Collection code	compare-dashboard-functions