The Hidden Cost of Your Default RPC

Public endpoints are oversubscribed, leading to unpredictable latency and failed requests. This directly impacts user experience and on-chain transaction success rates.

• Latency spikes from ~200ms to >2s during congestion.
• Request failure rates can exceed 5%, causing transaction drops.
• The hidden cost is lost users and failed DeFi arbitrage opportunities.

Free RPC providers like Infura and Alchemy monetize your application's user data and request patterns. Your traffic subsidizes their MEV and analytics businesses.

• Transaction flow data is aggregated and sold to hedge funds and searchers.
• User IP/address mapping creates privacy risks and competitive leakage.
• The solution is privacy-preserving RPCs like BlastAPI or dedicated infrastructure.

You pay for "free" RPCs with downtime. Single-provider dependence creates systemic risk, as seen in Infura and Alchemy outages halting major dApps.

• Single points of failure threaten application uptime.
• No SLAs or accountability for degraded service.
• The fix is multi-provider failover via services like Pocket Network or Chainstack.

Major providers lock you into their ecosystem by bundling RPCs with analytics, gas estimation, and node services. Exiting becomes costly and complex.

• Vendor lock-in increases switching costs and reduces negotiation power.
• Bundled pricing obscures the true cost of the core RPC service.
• The trend is toward unbundled, specialized RPCs (e.g., QuickNode for performance, Blockdaemon for institutional).

RPC providers are the ultimate MEV gatekeepers. Their transaction ordering directly influences extractable value, creating misaligned incentives with your users.

• Orderflow can be sold to searchers and builders, potentially harming user execution.
• Frontrunning protection requires specialized RPCs like Flashbots Protect or BloxRoute.
• Ignoring this turns your RPC into a hidden tax on user trades.

The endgame is dedicated, application-specific infrastructure. Protocols like dYdX and Aave now run their own nodes, controlling cost, data, and reliability.

• Predictable costs scale linearly with usage, not via opaque enterprise plans.
• Full data ownership eliminates leakage and enables custom indexing.
• Maximum configurability for consensus clients, execution layers, and mempool rules.

A public RPC is a shared, noisy, and untrusted endpoint. It's a single point of failure for latency, censorship, and data integrity.

• Key Benefit: Guaranteed performance SLAs and dedicated resources.
• Key Benefit: Mitigate front-running and MEV extraction risks for users.
• Key Benefit: Eliminate downtime from public endpoint rate-limiting.

Relying on one provider's API creates vendor risk and prevents optimization. Architect for multi-RPC failover and load balancing.

• Key Benefit: Automatic failover during outages using services like Chainstack, Alchemy, or QuickNode.
• Key Benefit: Route traffic based on latency, geographic location, or specific method calls.
• Key Benefit: Negotiate better rates by distributing traffic across providers.

Public RPCs can serve stale or forked chain data. Your user's wallet addresses and transaction patterns are exposed to the provider.

• Key Benefit: Use archive nodes for guaranteed historical data accuracy.
• Key Benefit: Implement privacy layers or use providers with zero-logging policies.
• Key Benefit: Validate RPC responses against cryptographic checkpoints or multiple sources.

The latency your devs see is not what your global users experience. Geo-distribution and edge caching are non-negotiable.

• Key Benefit: Deploy RPC endpoints in AWS Global Accelerator, Cloudflare, or use geo-distributed providers.
• Key Benefit: Cache frequent, immutable calls (e.g., token metadata, ABI data) at the edge.
• Key Benefit: Monitor real-user metrics, not just the health of your primary node.

A simple eth_blockNumber call costs the provider far less than a complex eth_getLogs query. Blind per-request pricing is inefficient.

• Key Benefit: Adopt compute-unit pricing models (e.g., Ethereum's Compute Units) where available.
• Key Benefit: Architect your dApp to batch requests and minimize on-chain queries.
• Key Benefit: Negotiate custom plans based on your actual method call mix, not just volume.

For protocols with $100M+ TVL or strict compliance needs, the long-term cost of control outweighs the operational burden.

• Key Benefit: Complete control over software versions, upgrade timing, and security patches.
• Key Benefit: Eliminate third-party API keys as an attack vector.
• Key Benefit: Custom instrumentation and data pipelines for your specific needs.