BlockPI

BlockPI is a Web3 infrastructure company providing distributed RPC (Remote Procedure Call) node services across more than 70 blockchain networks. Founded in 2021 and based in Hangzhou, China, the company positions itself as the largest professional RPC provider in the Asia-Pacific region and operates a globally distributed network of more than 1,000 high-performance nodes that collectively process over 80 billion monthly requests.

What BlockPI Does

At its core, BlockPI gives Web3 developers reliable, low-latency API access to blockchain networks without requiring them to operate their own nodes. Developers obtain an API key, select a supported network endpoint, and route their JSON-RPC calls through BlockPI's infrastructure. The platform handles node maintenance, geographic routing, failover, and uptime, achieving a stated historical service-level agreement of 99.99%.

BlockPI supports Solana mainnet as one of its non-EVM networks alongside Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, Aptos, Sui, NEAR, Cosmos, TON, and many others. Solana access is available at the Premium tier and above, reflecting the resource intensity of serving Solana RPC traffic at scale.

Solana DRPC

Alongside its general RPC service, BlockPI built Solana DRPC: a purpose-built decentralized RPC layer for the Solana network. The project is partially open-sourced on GitHub and operates at solana-drpc.blockpi.io. Rather than routing all traffic through a fixed set of operator-controlled nodes, Solana DRPC automatically discovers active Solana RPC nodes across the network and distributes incoming requests using a weighted round-robin algorithm. Nodes are continuously scored by latency and removed from rotation if they fall out of sync, ensuring requests consistently reach the fastest available backend.

The system is written in Go and includes request routing, caching, rate limiting, load balancing, and a monitoring dashboard. Planned additions include WebSocket and gRPC support, response caching, and offline request handling. By aggregating community-operated nodes rather than relying solely on BlockPI-owned infrastructure, Solana DRPC is intended to reduce per-developer costs and distribute RPC load more evenly across the broader Solana node ecosystem.

Infrastructure and Technical Capabilities

BlockPI's network is built around several technical principles:

Distributed architecture: The platform eliminates single points of failure by spreading requests across a large node fleet with geographic distribution. Nodes are deployed globally to minimize latency for users in different regions.

Latency targets: Dedicated node plans advertise sub-20ms latency with throughput exceeding 10,000 queries per second.

Protocol support: BlockPI supports JSON-RPC over HTTP, WebSocket, gRPC, HTTPS, and TCP/IP connections depending on chain and plan tier.

Advanced methods: Premium and enterprise plans include access to archive data, debug and trace RPC methods, ERC-4337 bundler services for account abstraction use cases, and MEV protection.

Managed nodes: The company offers a fully managed bring-your-own-server node service aimed at high-frequency trading teams, infrastructure developers, and DApp projects that need dedicated hardware without in-house node operations.

Service Tiers and Pricing

BlockPI uses a request unit (RU) credit model with several tiers:

• Free: 50 million RUs per month at no cost to registered accounts
• Pay As You Go: $0.01 per 50,000 RUs with no monthly commitment
• Elementary: $49 per month with a fixed RU allocation
• Premium: $299 per month with expanded access including Solana mainnet
• Enterprise/Dedicated: Custom pricing from $500 per month, unlimited speed and requests, with 24/7 technical support

This tiered structure lets individual developers prototype at no cost while providing enterprise-grade options for production applications.

Validator and Staking Operations

Beyond API services, BlockPI operates as an active blockchain validator across more than 35 networks, with over $130 million in staked assets under management at the time of publication. The company is also an AVS (Actively Validated Service) node operator participating in the EigenLayer restaking ecosystem. BlockPI is listed as a supporting infrastructure partner for the DIN (Decentralized Infrastructure Network) AVS, which runs an RPC and API marketplace on EigenLayer mainnet.

Funding and Investors

In January 2022, BlockPI closed a $3 million seed round. Institutional participants included NGC Ventures, Hashkey Capital, Continue Capital, SNZ Holding, Shima Capital, CMS Holdings, Old Fashion Research, LD Capital, Math Wallet, and StaFi Protocol. Individual investors included crypto investor Jocy Lin and Roger Luo, machine learning director at Niantic. No subsequent public funding rounds have been announced. BlockPI does not have a native token.

Partnerships and Ecosystem

BlockPI serves more than 200 Web3 projects including wallets, DeFi protocols, exchanges, and infrastructure providers. Named partnerships include Particle Network and Merlin Chain. BlockPI serves as the official infrastructure provider for Kaia, the blockchain formed from the merger of Klaytn and Finschia, and offers pricing discounts for projects participating in Kaia's Wave program.

Team

The company describes itself as having over six years of combined blockchain infrastructure experience, with members proficient across multiple programming languages and particular depth in network and middleware engineering. The team previously built NEAR DRPC using the same distributed architecture that underlies Solana DRPC; that project placed second at the NEAR Global MetaBuidl Hackathon.

Fit on Solana

BlockPI addresses a practical need on Solana: high-throughput, low-latency RPC access that developers cannot economically self-host. While Solana's main public RPC endpoint is frequently rate-limited and unreliable for production use, BlockPI offers both centralized premium RPC access at defined SLA tiers and the community-oriented Solana DRPC layer for teams that want distributed infrastructure at lower cost. The Solana DRPC design, which auto-discovers community nodes and routes by latency, aligns with Solana's permissionless participation model and is designed to become more resilient as additional node operators join the network.