Built for Solana: 20x Faster, 99.99% Uptime, 2x Throughput

We've spent the past two years partnering with Solana builders to understand their biggest pain points, and the last year rearchitecting our Solana offering to address them.

While the tooling in the Solana ecosystem has advanced rapidly, we saw opportunities to push performance and reliability even further — especially for data-intensive apps and enterprises.

Today, we’re excited to introduce what we’ve built - RPC and Streaming APIs built from scratch for Solana builders:

• Up to 20x faster archive calls, with no code changes, or proprietary methods required

• Up to 2x faster “heavy” methods, like getTransaction and getTokenAccountsByOwner

• Ultra-fast, ultra resilient gRPC streaming at less than half the price of other providers

• 99.99% uptime and 2x+ greater throughput across the full platform

• Tons of new features and functionality that weren’t possible before (gasless transactions, address activity webhooks, larger responses for calls like getTokenLargestAccounts, etc)

All of this is available to use today. Start here if you’re new to Alchemy, or keep using your existing setup with no change necessary if you’re already building with us! 

The Story

No other ecosystem of developers in the world (within Web3 or without) could wear the phrase “chewing glass” as such a badge of honor as Solana builders did - embracing the hard but necessary work of building world-changing products on an ever-evolving, boundary-pushing technology.

As Solana’s protocol and the tooling around it have leveled-up, the need to chew glass has shrunk, but is far from gone.

While working with developers on Solana over the past several years, from Bags.fm to Solflare to Robinhood, we found examples almost everywhere of builders finding creative ways to work around API constraints or infrastructure bottlenecks that slowed them down.

For example, many Solana teams struggle with archive data access. Existing RPC providers built on Bigtable-based systems can’t efficiently handle large-scale historical queries, often leading to gaps or incomplete data. Builders end up spending months rebuilding backfills, throttling requests, or piecing together missing transactions just to get reliable datasets. For data-intensive apps and wallets, this slows iteration to a crawl and limits what’s possible with analytics or indexing.

Our mission has been to remove those limitations and offer an uncompromised experience for every Solana builder.

20x Faster Archive Data

One of the most common asks we heard from Solana developers was that existing APIs just weren’t fast enough to meet their needs, especially on archive data like getTransaction, and “heavy” methods like getProgramAccounts.

Take historical getTransaction calls. We’ve benchmarked as faster than any provider on the market, even beating some of the most reputable infra providers by up to 20x (across p50, p90 and p95).

And that’s not an anomaly. We’re up to 3x faster on getBlock, up to 10x faster “heavy calls” like getTokenAccountsByOwner and getProgramAccounts, and more.

How is such a wide margin possible? We've spent years building novel infrastructure to serve these methods performantly, and almost as long tuning them at scale with builders to ensure we could deliver in any circumstance.

Take our infrastructure for serving archive data. We’ve taken the BigTable instance Solana infra providers have used for years and replaced it entirely. In its place we’ve built a multiregion, Hbase system purpose-built for RPC scale — distributing data globally for low-latency access, guaranteed completeness, and orders-of-magnitude faster performance under load.

Importantly, while some providers may ask you to use proprietary APIs that lock you in to see any performance improvements, all the optimizations we’ve made are accessible without any code changes or lock-in.

Finally, benchmarks can sometimes be gamed, and it’s common to see multiple providers claim they’re the fastest. The truth is, benchmarks don’t always tell the full story. Our focus is on helping builders understand real-world performance for their specific workloads. Our engineers can share our benchmarking methodology and help you run tailored tests. Contact our team to request a custom benchmark.

99.99% Reliability

Low latency is fantastic, but even the fastest API is unusable if it isn’t rock-solidly reliable. We’ve been building the most reliable APIs for the biggest onchain apps for more than 8 years, powering the most iconic and sensitive moments from Polymarket on election night to World’s Mainnet launch.

That is no different on Solana.

We’ve already been powering teams like Circle, Robinhood, TrustWallet on Solana reliably for years, but our current Solana infrastructure takes that to another level. Multi-region architecture, 3-5 layers of autonomous failover, extended (6000 block) replay on streaming reconnection… all built on a platform operated by a team of engineers that has the more experience powering blockchain teams at scale than any other in the world.

The result is infrastructure that is 99.99% uptime when you start using it, as you build, and most importantly, during your most critical moments.

New Capabilities

Beyond latency and reliability, the single biggest request we’ve heard from builders is for more flexibility, extensibility, and functionality out of the Solana API. As we’ve built up more and more novel infrastructure, we’ve been able to make much of this possible natively.

For example, to-date Solana archive APIs have been rigid in how you consume their data - making scans through the oldest signatures and transactions to get to anything recent. This can add complication and significantly slow down for any application doing something as basic as showing a user their activity sorted by recency.

With our new archive endpoints, we can easily get the latest data first - both making the APIs easier to use for those use cases, and a 10x better, faster experience for end users.

The list of new capabilities is too long to fit inline here (check out our Solana docs for more), but here are a few highlights:

• getTokenLargestAccounts has been extended to return up to 1000 accounts, rather than 20

• gRPC streaming has extended replay slots (up to 6000 blocks)

• Gasless transactions, built straight into our APIs

• 2× higher throughput than other providers, even for enterprise customers

• Recency-first archive queries (no more scanning from oldest)

• Address activity webhooks

Built for Solana

Solana as an ecosystem and technology is 1 of 1. Because of that, it’s important to mention not just what we’ve built, but our approach in doing so. We’ve learned (in some cases, the hard way), that merely porting a product from EVM to Solana is destined for struggles.

That’s why we’ve taken the time to redesign our Solana API in a way that’s built for long term partnership with the ecosystem and its builders. Over that time, we assembled a world-class team of engineers by joining forces with DexterLab and Bware Labs - two teams that spent years building specialized Solana infrastructure.

With the best of the best lined up to work on the rearchitecture, we took a very specific approach - use the 8+ years of technology Alchemy has built up as an accelerant, but be uncompromising in always building the best solution from the ground up for Solana.

We’re very proud of the result, and much prouder of the work we’re doing to empower thousands of teams on Solana.

All of this is available to use today. Start here if you’re new to Alchemy, or keep using your existing setup with no change necessary if you’re already building with us!