This post was originally published on Ankr
The data behind Ankr’s technical edge.
Ankr is overtaking some of the most well-known Web3 infrastructure providers by offering high performance in every metric that matters to blockchain devs when connecting their dApps to blockchains:
- Speed
- Reliability
- Affordability
- Supported blockchains
- User experience (UX)
- Distribution
- And decentralization
By choosing Ankr, Web3 developers and projects can save a great deal of time and money when building — but maybe most importantly, they can provide a superior user experience to their community while using a service that is becoming increasingly decentralized.
Below, we’ll explore why more developers are moving to Ankr for their blockchain infrastructure needs and why we are leading the pack in service quality based on neutral data.
Projects That Recently Moved To Use Ankr
Word of mouth and recommendations are the most powerful forms of marketing. And the positive feedback from our infrastructure users is spreading like wildfire. Here are a few of the projects that are happy they decided to use Ankr’s RPC services:
“Ankr supports the most chains that Sushi is deployed on. Since multi-chain is a top priority on our roadmap, Ankr has proven to be an invaluable partner. Were we excited to save money and use more decentralized infrastructure? Of course! Who wouldn’t be!?”
– Chilli, Core Developer at SushiSwap
“Adding Ankr as an infrastructure provider helped fulfill the desires of our community members who want to build with robust and reliable services.”
– Matthew Slipper, Head of Engineering at OP Labs
Incredible Growth In Every Area
Last year alone, Ankr grew by 2000% in serviced RPC requests, becoming the main infrastructure provider to Binance, Fantom, and Polygon. Ankr also claimed the space as the 2nd or 3rd most popular provider for 13 of the other top 15 PoS networks. Ankr has nodes spread across the world that serve 7.2 billion requests to 18+ blockchains daily — and Ankr has doubled and tripled this number in just a few months as we serve more traffic daily.
Quick stats:
- 7.2 Billion daily RPC requests served
- 27 supported networks (testnets included)
- 39,000 distinct developers
- 30+ global regions with nodes serving traffic
Speed
The map below shows where Ankr is outperforming our main competitors by providing extremely low-latency RPC connections. The blue circles show where Ankr performs better in terms of response times measured in milliseconds (in every global cloud region) and the number of chains we are providing faster times for. Keep in mind that the radius of the circles isn’t showing coverage areas — only where the nodes are located. Any dev or Web3 application can reach Ankr’s infrastructure from anywhere in the world with an internet connection.
Ankr has some of the lowest latency RPC connections in the industry that consistently test faster than our competitors in more locations and with more chains. But we use our internal testing tools primarily to constantly improve our services and identify any areas where we fall short.
As a note, all latency experiences are highly dependent on any developer’s physical location. You can test how providers stack up in your specific location by using our RPC Latency Comparison tool at any time. When using the comparison tool, remember that response times are highly variable and may change drastically every time you refresh. An hourly, daily, or weekly average latency (as shown in the map above) gives a more accurate and useful depiction of the data.
Additionally, there are some very significant advantages Ankr has in certain global regions where other companies simply cannot provide the same low latency due to the locations of their infrastructure.
By Average Latency, across all our supported chains, Ankr tested significantly faster than all competitors in theirs in regions outside the US:
- Asia (at least two times faster)
- Africa (at least three times faster)
- Oceania (at least two times faster)
- South America (nearly two times faster)
- Europe (at least 37% faster than all providers except QuickNode, which was only 2ms slower)
For these results, it is important to understand that none of the providers have as broad of a selection of blockchains as Ankr has, and these are overall statistics gathered as a global aggregate.
Speed is only one measurement of Web3 infrastructure. Sometimes who the “winner” is when it comes to speed comes down to a matter of 10ms — which is mostly negligible regarding the actual end-user experience. Although Ankr is outperforming other providers in the critical regions above, we also provide an exceptional level of service in every other category.
Reliability
In Web3 infrastructure, RPC service reliability is measured in areas like node uptime that are well-indicated by failed request percentages. Across all chains, Ankr’s infrastructure is currently logging around 1 failure per 100k requests. If a request reaches a node that experiences an outage or an error, our intelligent load balancer automatically re-routes the request to another node quickly.
Ankr consistently performs at the highest standards of uptime for providers. We have the added benefit of being more resistant to outages that affect centralized cloud providers from time to time as we use a unique blend of both bare-metal and cloud servers from Ankr and independent node providers. Here are the uptime measurements (from July 31 — August 6) for all companies using all supported chains:
- Ankr: 99.994
- Alchemy: 99.988
- Chainstack: 99.974
- Infura: 99.986
- QuickNode: 99.983
As the data shows, Ankr performs the best in uptime, although results for all companies are very positive. During the week of testing, Ankr was actually at a severe disadvantage since we measured all request returns around the clock while we were rate limited when testing competitors. This means Ankr had a much higher chance of catching ourselves not able to answer a query, but we were still able to perform at the highest level.
Affordability
Ankr provides developer-first, pay-as-you-go pricing for RPC services at competitive rates across all supported chains (the pricing per request method is the same for all blockchains). More than that, we are transitioning to a model that shares all RPC revenue with independent node providers, creating a more collaborative and decentralized way to serve blockchain traffic.
The graph above shows a price comparison of how much it would have cost SpiritSwap to make 8,590,000,000 requests using each provider (a real monthly figure for their usage of Ankr’s RPCs). You can see that Ankr charges drastically lower rates than some of our main competitors. Ankr also has a plan in place to deliver 70% of the pay-as-you-go RPC revenue coming to Ankr Network nodes to our node providers and token stakers. Out of the 70%, 49% will go to the individual stakers, and 21% will go to the node providers, as outlined further in our whitepaper.
Want to compare with other providers? Use our pricing calculator to see our costs for dozens of request methods.
Supported Blockchains
Ankr supports more chains than any other provider at 18+ proof-of-stake chains (Tron not yet pictured), with many more on the way. Ankr has 27 supported networks in total when accounting for the various testnets of different blockchain ecosystems. We believe that the future is multi-chain, and we’re doing everything we can to ensure that developers have easy access to as many chains as possible, so they have more expansive options when it comes down to choosing where to build.
You can see all supported chains and networks by vising our RPC dashboard.
User Experience
Ankr’s RPC dashboard is exceedingly accessible, allowing ungated access to copy and paste endpoints for immediate blockchain connections. No login, email signup, data surrendering, or other blockers stand in the way. The interface itself is clean and extremely easy to use, with all infrastructure data, usage data, and other pertinent data neatly laid out for users. We’ve even included an integration assistant with code snippets easily copy/pasteable for devs available in a variety of programming languages.
Global Distribution
Supporting More Regions Than Any Web3 Infrastructure Provider
Ankr serves blockchain requests from any location with incredibly low latency, thanks to our broad node locations in now over 30 regions (more than any web3 infrastructure provider). Ankr’s infrastructure uses a highly effective blend of both bare-metal servers in colocation data centers around the world and cloud providers. And, since Ankr will begin onboarding increasingly more independent node providers (see the section below), we can diversify our distribution even further.
Decentralization
Ankr has long had a track record of having a distributed node infrastructure to help protect against the vulnerability of housing all nodes with one cloud provider like AWS. But now, Ankr is shifting increasingly to decentralizing its services by welcoming many more independent node providers to serve RPC traffic from our load balancers.
Ankr is taking a big step to disrupt all infrastructure services (including our own model) by decentralizing. Ankr 2.0, as described in our new whitepaper, is a plan to build a completely decentralized and collaborative node infrastructure for Web3. Ankr Network has already begun onboarding many independent node providers that are serving thousands of blockchain requests as you read this:
- Pocket Network
- Harmony
- IoTeX
- Chainstack
- Fantom Foundation
- QuickNode.com
- And more!
Our transition to completely decentralize Ankr Network’s RPC services can be found in our whitepaper:
Final Notes
Hopefully, this article helped to explain the technical details behind why so many Web3 projects are moving to Ankr’s infrastructure. All this news is coming along with our Ankr 2.0 release, complete with ANKR token staking, Ankr DAO, and the newest version of the Ankr Network. This major structural update enables more independent parties to join Ankr Network and earn ANKR in exchange for serving network traffic — further growing and decentralizing the network. This shift will change the future of Web3 for the better, creating an infrastructure that is even more performant than centralized providers while adding the critical benefit of decentralization.
Ankr Is Pulling Ahead In Web3 Infrastructure was originally published in Ankr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
