Why Solana RPCs Are the Wrong Tool for Real-Time Market Data
Solana RPCs are excellent at what they were designed for: querying chain state. They are not designed to act as real-time market data feeds and trying to use them that way introduces latency, cost, and architectural complexity that most teams underestimate.
Why Solana RPCs Are the Wrong Tool for Real-Time Market Data
Solana RPCs are excellent at what they were designed for: querying chain state. They are not designed to act as real-time market data feeds and trying to use them that way introduces latency, cost, and architectural complexity that most teams underestimate.
This post explains why RPC polling breaks down for market data, and what professional systems do instead.
⸻
What Solana RPCs Are Good At
RPC endpoints are optimized for: • account lookups • transaction submission • historical queries • ad-hoc reads
They provide snapshots, not streams.
When you call an RPC method like getProgramAccounts or getAccountInfo, you’re asking:
“What does the chain look like right now?”
That’s fine for dashboards, explorers, and low-frequency applications.
⸻
Where RPCs Fall Apart for Market Data
Market data has different requirements: • continuous updates • same-slot visibility • deterministic ordering • high fanout
RPCs fail here for a few reasons:
- Polling introduces artificial latency
Even aggressive polling (every 100–250ms) means: • you’re always behind the chain • you often miss intermediate state changes • you react in the next slot, not the current one
- RPC responses are aggregated
Most RPC providers: • batch • cache • aggregate
That aggregation is invisible, but it costs time.
- RPC costs scale poorly
Polling hundreds or thousands of accounts: • explodes request volume • hits rate limits • increases spend with little gain in freshness
⸻
How Professional Systems Handle Market Data
Trading systems don’t “poll faster”. They change the architecture.
Instead of asking RPCs for state: • they subscribe to state changes • they ingest validator-level events • they process updates as they happen
This eliminates polling entirely.
⸻
When RPCs Are Still Fine
RPCs are still the right tool if: • you’re building a UI • latency isn’t critical • you only need periodic snapshots • data freshness isn’t a competitive factor
But if you’re building: • trading bots • arbitrage systems • analytics platforms • indexers
RPCs are the wrong abstraction.
⸻
Final Thought
Market data is not a query problem. It’s a streaming problem.
Once teams internalize that, their architecture and results change dramatically.