The goal of our analysis is to determine the best public endpoint on Optimism mainnet for each continent as well as the best overall, globally. According to our infrastructure directory for Optimism, there are at least 17 public endpoints for the mainnet on January 19, 2024 (list).

We are using our own (rpc) Performance Inspector which is a public web application. RPC providers change/expand their infrastructure and locations all the time which is why it might be useful for you to repeat test steps at your convenience here.

Please note that this performance comparison is not benchmarking. It would not make sense to use flood, chainbench (by Chainstack), k6 or another stress test / benchmarking tool for at least these reasons:

• The endpoints are being used by the public and suffocating them with requests might degrade the experience for other unsuspecting users;
• In most cases, the providers limit inbound traffic to public endpoints based on IP address and we would probably hit http429 errors very quickly.

Our Methodology

• We believe in WAGMI to mean the entire world which is why we send simultaneous RPC requests from 27 locations on 6 continents. Our “probes” are in AWS and not “in” your laptop browser.
• For this analysis we configured the inspector to use the eth_blockNumber method and you can choose to use eth_getBalance instead.
• Another setting for our runs was the limit to “not more than 1 request per region per second” whereas the alternative is to let each probe run as fast as it gets the previous response.
• You can create an account with other providers like Infura, Alchemy, QuickNode and use their private endpoints to perform a similar analysis. We omitted providers without public endpoints but you can include them. We don’t record endpoints and our results contain just the domain names of the URLs which were included in the runs.
• Since there were 17 providers and our inspector form accepts two at a time, we did 9 runs and combined their results for complete rankings. Although each run is for 2 providers, their computations are independent as each utilizes a separate instance of our RPC probe. See this Google Sheet or view “raw” individual results on the bottom of the page.
• Each pair of providers was run for 30 seconds and should have been measured for 30 requests from each region for a total of 810 measures. Requests are dispatched sequentially, one at a time. Latency duration is the sum of timings of milliseconds from the moment the request is sent until a success response gets back to us. Btw, we do a warmup request in each region which is omitted from the results.
• Additional info is in the FAQ on the bottom of the RPC Performance Inspector control form.

Eliminated Endpoints

• POKT Network endpoint errored out twice in a row from Frankfurt and Singapore.
• OnFinality is the only provider to have triggered http429 and did so from each of the 27 regions.
• DRPC had almost 4% of errors like “Error (500) on request no.1: {"error":{"message":"Unable to perform request","code":19}}”. You can read the error responses in the results pages (we capture up to 4 errors from each location for debugging purposes).

The Top 14 Public Endpoints on Optimism Mainnet

Overall / Global Ranking

(27 AWS regions on January 19, 2024)

No	Provider	Avg (ms)	Failed	429	Success	Duration (ms)
1	Nodies	73.19	0	0	810	59,283
2	thirdweb	78.76	0	0	810	63,795
3	Tenderly	89.54	0	0	810	72,524
4	Ankr	100.56	0	0	810	81,452
5	BlockPI Network	113.75	0	0	810	92,140
6	Blast API	135.13	0	0	810	109,457
7	Gateway.fm	136.06	0	0	810	110,212
8	LlamaNodes	143.95	0	0	810	116,598
9	1RPC	156.62	0	0	810	126,859
10	Allnodes	157.29	0	0	810	127,406
11	Optimism Foundation	189.49	0	0	810	153,487
12	BlockEden.xyz	354.51	0	0	810	287,150
13	Etherspot	413.58	0	0	810	334,998
14	OMNIA Protocol	533.02	1	0	809	431,216

Slow or Fast?

Why is some endpoint slower or faster than another? In short, we don’t know from the “outside” because we don’t have access to the host information such as the server/cluster cores, memory, networking etc. In our experience these are the most important factors:

1. the physical distance between the RPC server and the consumer;
2. quantity of users/requests that are being served at the moment;
3. size of the hardware.

In other words, no amount of CPU cores or memory can overcome the physics of networking transmission and the maximum theoretical speed of signals. Moreover a small server sitting “idle” could deliver responses more quickly than a huge cluster at a popular infra provider during a huge NFT mint.

Since distance is such a hard factor, it is very important that providers run nodes near population centers on each or most continents so that they can serve both “types” RPC consumers:

• globally distributed end-users like wallets;
• analytics apps like Dune etc. which generally ingest data into their servers located in one or a few data centers.

Our recommendation is to interpret the results in the following way: if you were to add your usage to these public endpoints and send requests similar to requests that we sent from nearby locations, then you too could expect to experience a similar performance. With a caveat that external factors might have changes since we typed this sentence and providers could have made changes to their infrastructure or other users could have changed their consumption patterns. So make sure to check yourself again.

As far as the efforts to cover the whole globe, we have also split results for 6 continents.

Best Optimism Mainnet Public Endpoints for North America

(5 AWS regions on January 19, 2024)

No	Provider	Avg (ms)	Failed	429	Success	Duration (ms)
1	Tenderly	20.20	0	0	150	3,030
2	LlamaNodes	40.53	0	0	150	6,080
3	thirdweb	48.91	0	0	150	7,337
4	Nodies	57.22	0	0	150	8,583
5	BlockPI Network	63.69	0	0	150	9,554
6	Blast API	65.81	0	0	150	9,872
7	Allnodes	88.53	0	0	150	13,279
8	Ankr	97.55	0	0	150	14,632
9	1RPC	103.33	0	0	150	15,500
10	Gateway.fm	130.45	0	0	150	19,567
11	Optimism Foundation	151.27	0	0	150	22,691
12	OMNIA Protocol	152.27	0	0	150	22,841
13	BlockEden.xyz	238.89	0	0	150	35,834
14	Etherspot	427.49	0	0	150	64,123

Best Optimism Mainnet Public Endpoints for South America

(1 AWS region on January 19, 2024)

No	Provider	Avg (ms)	Failed	429	Success	Duration (ms)
1	thirdweb	96.50	0	0	30	2,895
2	Ankr	113.67	0	0	30	3,410
3	Tenderly	121.53	0	0	30	3,646
4	Nodies	129.73	0	0	30	3,892
5	LlamaNodes	137.30	0	0	30	4,119
6	Allnodes	143.20	0	0	30	4,296
7	Blast API	144.13	0	0	30	4,324
8	BlockPI Network	201.00	0	0	30	6,030
9	Gateway.fm	201.20	0	0	30	6,036
10	1RPC	227.37	0	0	30	6,821
11	OMNIA Protocol	243.87	0	0	30	7,316
12	Optimism Foundation	251.27	0	0	30	7,538
13	BlockEden.xyz	412.17	0	0	30	12,365
14	Etherspot	604.53	0	0	30	18,136

Best Optimism Mainnet Public Endpoints for Europe

(8 AWS regions on January 19, 2024)

No	Provider	Avg (ms)	Failed	429	Success	Duration (ms)
1	Tenderly	21.18	0	0	240	5,082
2	Gateway.fm	28.24	0	0	240	6,778
3	Nodies	40.98	0	0	240	9,834
4	Optimism Foundation	42.68	0	0	240	10,244
5	thirdweb	52.53	0	0	240	12,607
6	Allnodes	55.67	0	0	240	13,360
7	BlockPI Network	74.32	0	0	240	17,837
8	Blast API	75.05	0	0	240	18,013
9	Ankr	89.86	0	0	240	21,566
10	LlamaNodes	112.77	0	0	240	27,065
11	1RPC	141.66	0	0	240	33,998
12	Etherspot	155.23	0	0	240	37,255
13	BlockEden.xyz	354.38	0	0	240	85,050
14	OMNIA Protocol	920.92	0	0	240	221,020

Best Optimism Mainnet Public Endpoints for the Middle East and Africa

(3 AWS regions on January 19, 2024)

No	Provider	Avg (ms)	Failed	429	Success	Duration (ms)
1	Gateway.fm	126.77	0	0	90	11,409
2	thirdweb	129.90	0	0	90	11,691
3	Nodies	143.44	0	0	90	12,910
4	Tenderly	147.41	0	0	90	13,267
5	Optimism Foundation	162.78	0	0	90	14,650
6	Ankr	168.80	0	0	90	15,192
7	Blast API	174.76	0	0	90	15,728
8	Allnodes	175.23	0	0	90	15,771
9	BlockPI Network	177.48	0	0	90	15,973
10	LlamaNodes	215.51	0	0	90	19,396
11	Etherspot	265.26	0	0	90	23,873
12	1RPC	310.03	0	0	90	27,903
13	BlockEden.xyz	457.06	0	0	90	41,135
14	OMNIA Protocol	1087.47	1	0	89	96,785

Best Optimism Mainnet Public Endpoints for Asia

(8 AWS regions on January 19, 2024)

No	Provider	Avg (ms)	Failed	429	Success	Duration (ms)
1	Nodies	72.33	0	0	240	17,360
2	Ankr	89.95	0	0	240	21,587
3	thirdweb	96.34	0	0	240	23,122
4	BlockPI Network	128.39	0	0	240	30,813
5	1RPC	132.19	0	0	240	31,726
6	Tenderly	154.53	0	0	240	37,088
7	LlamaNodes	198.45	0	0	240	47,628
8	Gateway.fm	201.06	0	0	240	48,254
9	Blast API	201.90	0	0	240	48,455
10	Allnodes	263.68	0	0	240	63,284
11	OMNIA Protocol	273.35	0	0	240	65,605
12	Optimism Foundation	327.80	0	0	240	78,673
13	BlockEden.xyz	377.95	0	0	240	90,707
14	Etherspot	680.87	0	0	240	163,408

Best Optimism Mainnet Public Endpoints for Australia

(2 AWS regions on January 19, 2024)

No	Provider	Avg (ms)	Failed	429	Success	Duration (ms)
1	Ankr	84.42	0	0	60	5,065
2	thirdweb	102.38	0	0	60	6,143
3	Nodies	111.73	0	0	60	6,704
4	Tenderly	173.52	0	0	60	10,411
5	1RPC	181.85	0	0	60	10,911
6	BlockPI Network	198.88	0	0	60	11,933
7	LlamaNodes	205.17	0	0	60	12,310
8	Blast API	217.75	0	0	60	13,065
9	Allnodes	290.27	0	0	60	17,416
10	OMNIA Protocol	294.15	0	0	60	17,649
11	Gateway.fm	302.8	0	0	60	18,168
12	Optimism Foundation	328.18	0	0	60	19,691
13	BlockEden.xyz	367.65	0	0	60	22,059
14	Etherspot	470.05	0	0	60	28,203

Overall Winner on January 19, 2024

Congratulations Nodies as the best public endpoint on Optimism mainnet (all endpoints).

Big shoutouts to continental leaders: Tenderly, thirdweb, Tenderly, Gateway.fm, Nodies, and Ankr.

Complete data for specific locations are in this sheet so additional kudos go out to:

• LlamaNodes for their win in Ohio (note, they run directly from AWS Ohio);
• 1RPC for their results from Hyderabad.

Yes, we realize that the population in South America is ten times greater than Australia yet we measure from both Sydney and Melbourne as opposed to Sao Paulo alone. Our goals are to improve by expanding locations in South America and adding continental multipliers proportional to their populations.

Indeed, it might appear that providers which also use AWS might have a significant advantage but we don’t think it had much impact. The IP data shows the following clouds & CDNs:

• CLOUDFLARENET: Nodies, thirdweb, Ankr, Block PI Network, Blast API, Allnodes, BlockEden.xyz, Etherspot, OMNIA Protocol;
• GOOGLE-CLOUD-PLATFORM: Tenderly and Optimism Foundation;
• Cloudsigma Ag: Gateway.fm;
• MICROSOFT-CORP-MSN-AS-BLOCK: 1RPC;
• and only LlamaNodes is directly in AMAZON-02 with best result as No2 in North America; looks like they run from Ohio only, whereas we measure from 5 locations for that continent!

Raw Results

• 1RPC + Allnodes https://www.comparenodes.com/global-node-comparison/12777db2-cd7e-4fa1-b878-3c6298717ee3/
• Ankr + Blast API https://www.comparenodes.com/global-node-comparison/e5d5dcf0-f9b0-45a3-85e5-cce82a1cf1ec/
• BlockEden.xyz + BlockPI https://www.comparenodes.com/global-node-comparison/494205ea-c897-47e9-85c9-672db9f6816a/
• Etherspot https://www.comparenodes.com/global-node-comparison/39b7a503-d8eb-4317-a0b9-5d5204648ee8/
• Gateway.fm + LlamaNodes https://www.comparenodes.com/global-node-comparison/04569c0e-361f-4e5a-82c2-569d5d8ff074/
• Nodies + OMNIA Protocol https://www.comparenodes.com/global-node-comparison/d0e5079c-f85b-4c50-ab06-8e268fd00483/
• The Optimism Foundation https://www.comparenodes.com/global-node-comparison/cf5b7352-a3d6-4f33-9dc1-0d441356b848/
• thirdweb + Tenderly https://www.comparenodes.com/global-node-comparison/b4147f6d-828e-41c7-861b-9b521bbcf40f/