At Ankr, performance and privacy aren’t trade-offs; they’re prerequisites. That’s why, nine months ago, we made one of the most ambitious infrastructure upgrades in our history: migrating our RPC traffic off Cloudflare and onto a private global fiber network, owned and operated by our sister company Asphere.

This wasn’t just about going faster. It was about owning the full stack, gaining operational transparency, and eliminating third-party data exposure. It marked the beginning of Phase 4 in our evolution.

The Four Phases of Our RPC Infrastructure Evolution

Our infrastructure journey has been one of continuous reinvention:

• Phase 1: Cloud Node Provisioning for Individual Customers

RPC access began with manually provisioned nodes in two regions.

• Phase 2: Cloud Nodes with Global Cloudflare Load Balancing

We scaled up to global cloud coverage, but routing and privacy were still dependent on third-party CDNs.

• Phase 3: Bare-Metal Nodes with Cloudflare Load Balancing

We gained control over compute and storage, but still relied on Cloudflare for traffic management.

• Phase 4: Global Fiber + Purpose-Built Load Balancer

Today, Ankr RPC is powered by Asphere’s private backbone, custom edge stack, and a proprietary load balancer.

This most recent phase has given us the power, visibility, and resilience we always wanted, but not without trade-offs.

Why We Left Cloudflare

Cloudflare served us well during earlier phases of our growth. But as demand for ultra-low-latency, high-volume blockchain access surged, we began to encounter structural limitations:

• Unpredictable Latency: Cloudflare’s edge proxying introduced routing delays and jitter inconsistent with the needs of modern dApps.
• Opaque Support Channels: Diagnosing performance issues often meant waiting on external support with limited insight into what was happening under the hood.
• Data Retention Concerns: As a third-party provider, Cloudflare retains metadata and logs. We couldn’t offer strong privacy assurances while relying on their edge network.
• Generic Infrastructure: We needed fine-grained control over protocols, congestion handling, and TLS behavior—none of which was possible on shared infrastructure.

What We Gained with Asphere

With Asphere, we’ve taken full ownership of the physical and logical network that powers Ankr RPC:

• Private Global Backbone: A dedicated fiber mesh across North America, Europe, and Asia that avoids the public internet wherever possible.
• Fully Owned Edge PoPs: All infrastructure, from NICs to TLS, runs on machines we control, tuned for blockchain workloads.
• Custom Anycast Routing: We built our own BGP-based routing stack to keep traffic close, fast, and fail-safe.
• End-to-End Observability: When something goes wrong, we no longer guess; we see it, debug it, and fix it.
• Privacy by Design: Traffic never leaves our ecosystem. No third-party logs, no silent data capture.

“By moving off Cloudflare and onto infrastructure we control end-to-end, we’ve gained total visibility into traffic flow, eliminated external data exposure, and dramatically improved latency for our users. Asphere gives us the sovereignty and performance blockchain deserves.”

— Peter Stewart, Head of Infrastructure at Ankr

The Real-World Results

This wasn’t a flip-of-a-switch upgrade. Running your own network increases your dependency on great engineers and great engineering. But the benefits have far outweighed the costs.

• 50–80% Latency Reduction: We’ve seen a dramatic improvement in response times across all major regions.
• Improved Tail Latencies: Even at peak load, performance remains stable and predictable.
• Massive Throughput Gains: Our system now supports millions of concurrent RPC calls without breaking a sweat.
• Operational Control: We no longer depend on opaque escalation chains. If something breaks, we own it—and fix it fast.
• Stronger Privacy Guarantees: With Cloudflare out of the loop, user metadata stays out of third-party hands.

“This is about more than performance. Web3 deserves infrastructure with integrity. No black boxes, no silent data capture. Our move to Asphere ensures that RPC traffic is fast, verifiable, and private by design.”

— Stanley Wu, CTO of Ankr

What’s Next: The Custom Load Balancer

As we continue Phase 4, we’re preparing to unveil the other half of this transformation: our custom-built RPC load balancer, developed from scratch to understand and route blockchain traffic more intelligently than any generic proxy or edge service.

Stay tuned for our next blog post, where we’ll explore how it works, what problems it solves, and why it’s a major leap beyond traditional Layer 7 load balancing.

Work With Us

If you’re building blockchain applications and need RPC that’s fast, private, and engineered for scale, Ankr RPC on Asphere is ready for you. Whether you’re a developer, a protocol team, or an enterprise platform, we’ve got the performance, transparency, and reliability you need.

Get started with Ankr RPC

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