RPC Providers Compared
How RPC providers like Alchemy, Infura, QuickNode, and Ankr sit between wallets and blockchains — their business models, reliability differences, censorship risks, and how to think about decentralised alternatives.
What an RPC Provider Actually Does
Every time you click 'Swap' in a wallet, your wallet has to ask a blockchain node what your balance is, what the current gas price is, and finally submit the signed transaction. That conversation is called an RPC (Remote Procedure Call) request. Wallets, dApps, and block explorers all rely on RPC endpoints to talk to blockchains. Running your own node is expensive and technically demanding, so almost everyone uses a hosted RPC provider — Alchemy, Infura (owned by ConsenSys), QuickNode, Ankr, Chainstack, or a smaller specialist. When you install MetaMask, its default Ethereum RPC is Infura; when you use Uniswap in a browser, the requests flow through one of these providers.
The Free Tier and the Reality
Most providers offer generous free tiers so that developers and hobbyist users never see the bill. The revenue comes from dApps and wallets that hit rate limits, need advanced features (archive nodes, trace APIs, subscription websockets), or want SLAs. This creates a two-tier reality: retail users interact with a small number of providers indirectly, and those providers are load-bearing for the whole ecosystem. A single Infura outage in 2020 broke MetaMask for tens of millions of users despite Ethereum itself running normally.
Why This Matters for Decentralisation
Blockchains are decentralised at the protocol level, but access to them is often centralised at the RPC layer. If a handful of RPC providers went offline simultaneously, most wallets would appear broken even though the chains themselves would keep producing blocks. Providers can also, at least in theory, filter transactions, log user activity, or geo-block users. This risk has driven interest in decentralised RPC networks (Pocket Network, Ankr's decentralised endpoints, POKT) and in wallets that let users configure their own RPC endpoints.
- RPC providers are the translation layer between wallets/dApps and blockchains
- Most retail users never choose their RPC provider explicitly — the wallet picks
- Free tiers cover retail load; paying customers subsidise the infrastructure
- RPC centralisation is a real practical risk even when the blockchain is decentralised
Key Takeaways
- Every wallet interaction with a blockchain goes through an RPC endpoint
- A small number of providers (Alchemy, Infura, QuickNode) serve most Ethereum + L2 traffic
- Outages at these providers can make the whole ecosystem look broken
- You can usually override the default RPC in your wallet's advanced settings
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References & further reading
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