What Blockchain API Supports Fast Data Retrieval? Benchmarks and Trade-Offs

Concise summary: If you’re choosing a blockchain API for speed, measure p95 latency under your real workloads and watch for hidden limits like block-range caps, indexing depth, and multi-region routing. This guide compares recent independent and vendor-published benchmarks, explains the post‑EIP‑4844 “blob” read path, and gives step‑by‑step recipes to hit sub‑100 ms reads at scale.

Why “fast data retrieval” is a business metric, not a nice‑to‑have

Every additional 100 ms on your read path increases abandonment risk in trading, checkout, and wallet UX. In 2025, leading providers began publishing live latency telemetry and pushing push-based data products (webhooks/streams) so you can replace noisy polling with exactly-once delivery. But “fastest” depends on your chain mix, regions, and methods (e.g., Solana getProgramAccounts, Ethereum eth_getLogs, or rollup blob reads). The only reliable answer is to benchmark the specific calls your product makes, under concurrency, across regions, and against multiple vendors. (blog.quicknode.com)

The speed leaders in 2025 (and how to read the numbers)

Ethereum, globally: QuickNode’s public QuickLee V2 shows live p95 latency around 56 ms (Aug 21, 2025) vs. 178 ms (Chainstack) and 232 ms (Alchemy), measured across regions. This is vendor‑operated telemetry but continuously updated and filterable by region and method, which is valuable when you’re shortlisting. Treat it as a starting signal to replicate with your own workloads. (blog.quicknode.com)
Solana, globally: QuickNode’s Solana report shows p95 ≈ 50 ms with other majors between ~100–300 ms (e.g., Triton ~100 ms, Helius and Alchemy ~225–237 ms at the time of test). Again, reproduce these with your exact method mix (e.g., getProgramAccounts, getMultipleAccounts) and regions. (blog.quicknode.com)
High-RPS stress (EVM L1/L2): Nodies publishes multi‑provider, multi‑rate tests (10→10,000 rps). On Base and Optimism, its datasets show Nodies and Blast API retaining low P50/P99 under 10k rps while others degrade—results vary by chain and method; these are provider‑run benches, so validate in‑house. The takeaway: under extreme load, designs with deep caching and precomputed receipts/logs hold up better. (docs.nodies.app)
Provider transparency and independent services: CompareNodes launched a benchmarking‑as‑a‑service in Jan 2025 with default test regions (N. Virginia, Frankfurt, Singapore). For procurement, this lets you commission neutral runs with your method mix before you commit. (comparenodes.com)
Incident reality check: Status pages and outage trackers show transient latency spikes around heavy methods (e.g., eth_getLogs on Base via Infura in late May–early June 2025). Design for graceful degradation (smaller ranges, backoff) regardless of vendor. (isdown.app)

What changed in the last 12 months that affects “fast reads”

Ethereum’s EIP‑4844 (blobs) changed the read path for rollup data
Rollups post data as “blobs” to the consensus layer; execution‑layer JSON‑RPC doesn’t serve raw blob contents. For blob retrieval, you need the Beacon API (e.g., /eth/v1/beacon/blob_sidecars/{block_id}). Some providers now expose Beacon endpoints alongside execution RPC; verify support if you index rollup data or reconcile fees. Blobs are pruned after ~2 weeks, so you’ll need an archiver if you require longer retention. (eips.ethereum.org)

QuickNode documents Beacon endpoints (blocks, debug, blob sidecars), including historical blob access. Blockdaemon lists supported Beacon routes as well. Require both execution RPC and Beacon APIs in your RFP if blob data matters to you. (quicknode.com)
Practical impact: you’ll see different latencies for “blob reads” vs. classic eth_* queries. Budget extra time for cross‑API orchestration and caching (e.g., store sidecars in S3/Arweave on ingest to avoid misses after expiry). (7blocklabs.com)

Solana staked QoS and “priority lanes” for write and stream paths
Solana’s Stake‑Weighted QoS (SWQoS) gives staked connections higher bandwidth to leaders, improving tx inclusion. Helius exposes “staked connections” by default on paid plans; this primarily accelerates writes, but their stack also focuses on low‑latency reads and archival queries (e.g., cursor‑based getTransactionsForAddress). For read heavy apps, pair standard JSON‑RPC with gRPC streams and avoid poll loops. (report.helius.dev)
Client improvements under the hood
Erigon v3 and newer Nethermind builds improved disk footprint and RPC responsiveness (e.g., pre‑persisted receipts speeding eth_getLogs, faster tracing paths). When a provider says “10x faster logs” on archive, it often maps to client features like persisted receipts and flat state. Ask vendors which client/flags back your endpoint. (github.com)

Hidden speed killers you must plan for

Block‑range caps on eth_getLogs: Providers cap ranges to keep queries responsive. Examples: QuickNode typically 10,000‑block range on paid plans; Alchemy supports “unlimited” ranges but enforces caps by response size/log count (e.g., 10k logs cap or 2k‑block uncapped with 150 MB limit). Chainstack recommends 5,000 blocks for Ethereum per request. Design pagination and parallelization by chain. (quicknode.com)
Response-size ceilings: Even when a vendor advertises “unlimited” block ranges, large payloads will hit timeouts or size caps. Plan for topic filters, address filtering, and range splitting. (alchemy.com)
Region mismatches: A “fast” provider in US‑East might be merely average in APAC. Use providers with anycast/global nodes or explicit region pinning. Chainstack’s Global Node routes to the closest healthy location and fails over if lag > 40 blocks—features that cut cross‑region roundtrips. (docs.chainstack.com)
Product sunsets and migrations: QuickNode is sunsetting QuickAlerts (as of July 31, 2025) in favor of next‑gen Webhooks. If your alerting relies on legacy pipelines, allocate time to migrate filters and delivery semantics. (quicknode.com)

Push beats pull: modern “fast data” patterns

Polling JSON‑RPC is the slowest, noisiest way to stay current. In 2025, the practical way to reduce latency and cost is to switch to provider‑managed streams:

QuickNode Webhooks and Streams: serverless push pipelines with reorg handling, gzip compression, exactly‑once semantics, and destinations like webhooks, S3, PostgreSQL, and Snowflake. Use Webhooks for filtered, real‑time matches; use Streams to backfill and ETL whole datasets (blocks/tx/receipts/logs). (quicknode.com)
Alchemy Custom Webhooks + Transfers/Token APIs: real‑time GraphQL webhooks plus indexing endpoints like alchemy_getTransactionReceipts and the Transfers API to fetch a wallet’s complete history in one call—often 100× fewer requests than naive log scans. (alchemy.com)
Moralis Streams: cross‑chain event webhooks with explicit delivery guarantees, retry schedules, and replay of failed deliveries—useful for ops SLAs. (moralis.com)
Solana streams: Helius exposes Enhanced WebSockets and gRPC (LaserStream). Pair streams with standard RPC to avoid high‑fanout polling on getProgramAccounts. (helius.dev)
Decentralized routing: Lava Network’s RPC Routing Engine multiplexes across many providers with QoS scoring (latency, availability, freshness), global pairing lists, and failover. For teams that want vendor diversity without building a router, Lava is a production option. (docs.lavanet.xyz)

Practical, concrete recipes for sub‑100 ms reads

Ethereum “recent activity” dashboard (logs without pain)

Replace broad eth_getLogs with Alchemy Transfers API to pull a wallet’s internal/external/token transfers in one request; subscribe to Custom Webhooks for real‑time deltas. This cuts queries by orders of magnitude and stabilizes p95. (alchemy.com)
If you must use eth_getLogs, cap ranges to 3–5k blocks (Ethereum), filter by topics and address, parallelize by time windows, and dedupe client‑side. Respect provider caps (e.g., QuickNode 10k blocks on paid). (docs.chainstack.com)

Solana trading UI (same‑slot feel)

Use Helius staked connections for transaction sends, and LaserStream gRPC or Enhanced WebSockets for state changes. Avoid polling getProgramAccounts every few hundred ms; let streams push updates and confirm via lightweight RPC calls. (helius.dev)

Rollup/DA observer (post‑EIP‑4844)

For L2 data auditing, run a Beacon API client or use a provider exposing /eth/v1/beacon/blob_sidecars and /eth/v1/beacon/blobs. Cache sidecars immediately; blobs are pruned after ~2 weeks. Keep execution RPC separate for receipts/traces. Validate latency targets per provider—Beacon routes may differ from execution RPC SLAs. (eips.ethereum.org)

High‑RPS analytics ingest

Push mode: QuickNode Streams → S3/Snowflake; batch to reduce webhook fanout.
Pull mode: Favor providers running Erigon with persisted receipts for eth_getLogs; confirm with vendors. Nodies’ stress benches suggest caching/persisted receipts keep P99s under control at 1–10k rps, but verify in your region. (github.com)

A minimal, real‑world benchmarking harness you can adapt

Use three families of calls per chain: “near‑head cheap” (blockNumber), “index‑heavy” (getLogs with filters), and “archive‑heavy” (balance at a past block or Solana historical transactions). Run each at concurrencies 8/64, over 5 minutes, with p50/p95/p99 and error‑rate. Example (Python, aiohttp):

import asyncio, aiohttp, time, json, statistics

RPCS = {
  "alchemy_eth": "https://eth-mainnet.g.alchemy.com/v2/YOUR_KEY",
  "quicknode_eth": "https://docs-demo.quiknode.pro/...",
  "chainstack_eth": "https://nd-...chainstacklabs.com",
}

CALLS = [
  {"method":"eth_blockNumber","params":[]},  # cheap
  {"method":"eth_getLogs","params":[{"fromBlock":"0xF42400","toBlock":"0xF4E1C0",
                                     "topics":["0xddf252ad..."], "address":"0xA0b8..."}]},  # index-heavy
  {"method":"eth_getBalance","params":["0x742d35Cc6634C0532925a3b844Bc454e4438f44e","0xC35000"]} # archive-ish
]

async def worker(name, url, payload, N, results):
  async with aiohttp.ClientSession(timeout=aiohttp.ClientTimeout(total=10)) as s:
    for _ in range(N):
      t0 = time.perf_counter()
      try:
        async with s.post(url, json={"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1, **payload}) as r:
          await r.read()
          results.append((name, max(1, int((time.perf_counter()-t0)*1000)), r.status))
      except Exception:
        results.append((name, 10000, 599))

async def bench():
  results = []
  tasks = []
  for name, url in RPCS.items():
    for p in CALLS:
      for _ in range(8):  # concurrency 8
        tasks.append(asyncio.create_task(worker(f"{name}:{p['method']}", url, p, 50, results)))
  await asyncio.gather(*tasks)
  # summarize
  by = {}
  for k, ms, status in results:
    by.setdefault(k, []).append(ms)
  for k, arr in by.items():
    arr.sort()
    p50 = statistics.median(arr)
    p95 = arr[int(0.95*len(arr))-1]
    print(k, "p50", p50, "p95", p95, "n", len(arr))
asyncio.run(bench())

Run this in three regions (us‑east‑1, eu‑central‑1, ap‑southeast‑1) with the same API keys.
For Solana, swap in getBlockHeight (cheap), getProgramAccounts with dataSlice and filters (index-heavy), and getBalance at old slot or a historical transaction lookup (archive‑heavy).
Target: p95 under 100 ms for cheap; under 250 ms for index‑heavy at modest concurrency; error rate < 0.5%. Tighten targets for your UX.

Vendor‑specific strengths and trade‑offs (what to ask in an RFP)

QuickNode
Strengths: live, public latency telemetry by chain/region (QuickLee), strong Streams/Webhooks with exactly‑once delivery, multi‑region deployments; recent Solana latency wins at sub‑60 ms p95. Ask about eth_getLogs block‑range caps and regional pinning. (blog.quicknode.com)
Alchemy
Strengths: “Supernode” architecture, Custom Webhooks, Transfers/Token APIs that collapse many RPCs into one; enterprise‑grade multi‑region and SLAs; claims of sub‑50 ms global latency in 2025 marketing. Validate your method mix in target regions and confirm response size behavior for logs. (alchemy.com)
Chainstack
Strengths: Global Node (geo‑routing, failover), explicit best‑practice guidance on eth_getLogs ranges; flexible RPS‑tiered pricing and dedicated nodes. Confirm archive availability and whether persisted receipts/trace are enabled for your workloads. (docs.chainstack.com)
Helius (Solana‑first)
Strengths: staked connections (SWQoS), Enhanced WebSockets/gRPC, Solana‑specific archival accelerations (cursor‑based methods). If you’re Solana‑primary, include Helius in bake‑offs even if you use a multi‑chain aggregator elsewhere. (helius.dev)
Blast API / Nodies
Strengths: good performance under high RPS in vendor‑run benches; attractive for ETL and analytics bursts. Validate in your geography and confirm feature sets (trace/debug, archive, webhooks). (docs.nodies.app)
Blockdaemon (Ubiquity)
Strengths: unified Data API across protocols (incl. UTXO), claims of reduced API latency via standardized endpoints; Beacon API support documented. Verify sandbox p95 and any per‑dataset SLAs. (blockdaemon.com)
Decentralized router (Lava)
Strengths: vendor diversity with QoS‑based routing and cross‑validation; public RPCs for ecosystems; enterprise “Smart Router” for unified control plane. Useful if you need censorship‑resistance and multi‑vendor failover out of the box. (docs.lavanet.xyz)
Infura
Strengths: deep Ethereum/L2 coverage, 99.99% uptime claims; pragmatic for MetaMask‑first ecosystems. Watch credit models for heavy index calls and design around known hotspots like historical eth_getLogs ranges (they documented a Base incident in May–June 2025). (infura.io)

Implementation best practices we deploy for clients at 7Block Labs

Split your read path:
- “Fresh” path for near‑head cacheable queries (blockNumber, latest balances).
- “Index” path for logs/transfers via specialized indexing APIs (Transfers/NFT/Token APIs, or your subgraph).
- “Historical” path for archive‑heavy scans (own indexer or vendor with persisted receipts). This keeps your p95 consistent. (alchemy.com)
Prefer push over poll: webhooks/streams with reorg handling reduce median and tail latencies and cut costs. If you must poll, use HTTP/2 keepalive, JSON‑RPC batching, and exponential backoff with jitter. (quicknode.com)
Engineer around eth_getLogs limits: enforce small ranges per request (provider‑specific), shard by block ranges/topics, and parallelize with bounded concurrency. For power users, persist receipts or consume provider datasets that already precompute them. (docs.chainstack.com)
Put regions under version control: pin endpoints by region where needed; otherwise, use global anycast/geo‑routed endpoints to minimize cross‑ocean RTT. Measure p95 by user geography each release. (docs.chainstack.com)
Post‑EIP‑4844 hygiene: wire a Beacon API client, archive blob sidecars within the ~2‑week window, and expose blob metrics (base fee, count per block) in your ops dashboards. (eips.ethereum.org)
Multi‑vendor hedging: for critical reads, use hedged requests (send to two providers after X ms) and accept the first matching quorum response; rotate keys/providers when error rate spikes. Lava’s routing engine is a managed option if you don’t want to build this. (docs.lavanet.xyz)

Brief, in‑depth example: choosing a provider set for a US/EU crypto app (Dec 2025)

Scenario: You serve US/EU users, EVM + Solana, with a real‑time portfolio page and in‑app swaps.

Reads (EVM): Alchemy for Transfers/Token APIs + Custom Webhooks for address activity; QuickNode Streams for block/log ETL to Snowflake, keeping your analytics warehouse tapped into near‑real‑time data. This eliminates broad log scans at request time. Measure p95 via your CI harness every deploy. (alchemy.com)
Writes/Streams (Solana): Helius staked connections for sends; Enhanced WebSockets/gRPC for program events; keep QuickNode Solana endpoints in rotation for geographic diversity where they show strong p95. (helius.dev)
DA/Blobs (if you run a rollup or consume L2 batches): ensure your vendor exposes Beacon blob routes or run your own beacon node. Archive sidecars nightly. (quicknode.com)
Router: if you prefer a single endpoint with multi‑vendor resilience, put Lava’s Smart Router in front of your stack to route by QoS. (docs.lavanet.xyz)

The bottom line

“Fastest” is workload‑ and region‑dependent. Start with vendor‑published telemetry (e.g., QuickLee) and commission an independent run (e.g., CompareNodes) before purchase. Then continuously benchmark in CI with your own harness. (blog.quicknode.com)
Don’t brute‑force logs at runtime. Use indexing APIs (Transfers/Token/NFT) and push systems (Webhooks/Streams). Your users feel tail latencies (p95/p99), not your medians. (alchemy.com)
Plan for 4844/Beacon APIs, Solana SWQoS, and client‑level features (Erigon receipts) that materially change speed. Ask vendors for specifics, not slogans. (eips.ethereum.org)

If you want 7Block Labs to run a focused bake‑off for your stack (methods, chains, and geos), we’ll deliver a short‑list with signed‑off p95 targets, fallback design, and cost models.

Sources and further reading

QuickLee V2 live latency dashboards and Solana latency report for comparative p95s and methodology. (blog.quicknode.com)
Nodies multi‑provider stress benchmarks (Base, Optimism, Ethereum) at 10→10k rps to understand tail behavior under load. (docs.nodies.app)
EIP‑4844 spec and Beacon API blob routes for post‑Dencun read paths. (eips.ethereum.org)
Helius staked connections, Enhanced WebSockets/gRPC, and Solana SWQoS backgrounder. (helius.dev)
Webhooks/Streams docs: QuickNode Webhooks/Streams; Alchemy Custom Webhooks and Transfers API; Moralis Streams. (quicknode.com)
Chainstack Global Node docs and eth_getLogs best‑practice limits. (docs.chainstack.com)
Erigon/Nethermind updates impacting RPC speed (persisted receipts, execution/RPC optimizations). (github.com)

Description: A procurement‑grade guide to fast blockchain data retrieval in 2025: real latency benchmarks, the post‑EIP‑4844 blob read path, Solana SWQoS, and practical patterns (webhooks/streams, logs pagination, Beacon API) to hit sub‑100 ms p95 with concrete provider trade‑offs.