Helius Launches Low-Latency Solana RPC
Solana infrastructure provider Helius has launched Gatekeeper, a low-latency RPC gateway. The new service is designed to provide a competitive advantage for high-frequency trading and arbitrage strategies on the network. Community members have noted they are using the new endpoints to optimize transaction fetching for on-chain analysis.
- Gatekeeper is an in-house edge gateway built in Rust that replaces Helius's previous reliance on Cloudflare, reducing network hops for faster response times. - Early benchmarks show significant latency reductions, with `getBlock` requests dropping from 324ms to ~41ms and cold `getSlot` calls improving 4.6x from 123ms to 27ms. - This infrastructure directly addresses a common Solana bottleneck where RPC nodes can become overloaded during high-traffic events like memecoin launches, causing stale data and transaction failures for traders even when the blockchain itself is functioning properly. - Helius was co-founded by CEO Mert Mumtaz, a former Coinbase software engineer, and raised a $9.5 million Series A round that included Solana co-founders Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal as investors. - The company provides core infrastructure for over 1,000 projects in the Solana ecosystem, including prominent trading platforms and wallets such as Jupiter, Phantom, and Backpack. - Prior to the Gatekeeper launch, independent analysis in January 2026 reported Helius's average RPC latency at around 140ms. - For existing users, migrating to the new gateway during its beta phase requires only changing the RPC endpoint URL, with no adjustments to API keys or pricing.
