ERPC Begins Providing Full Historical Data Access for Solana RPC Across All Regions, Enabling Complete and Gapless Retrieval via Old Faithful Integration

ERPC, operated by ELSOUL LABO B.V. (Headquarters: Amsterdam, the Netherlands; CEO: Fumitake Kawasaki) together with Validators DAO, announces the official availability of historical data access for Solana RPC.

On the edge.erpc.global endpoint, ERPC’s Solana RPC serves historical data through history access. Users on the Free plan, with other free allowances or on a paid plan request history access for older blocks and transactions by adding history=true to the edge.erpc.global URL.

This enhancement is achieved by integrating Old Faithful, an open-source technology designed specifically for Solana archive and historical data distribution, into ERPC’s RPC infrastructure.

On Solana, approximately 500 GB of data is generated per epoch, which typically spans one to two days. This data volume continues to grow year by year, placing significant demands on both storage capacity and I/O performance for RPC nodes.

To maintain performance and operational stability, most standard RPC nodes retain only a limited number of recent epochs. In many cases, configurations with around 4 TB of storage can hold only three to four epochs of data, corresponding to roughly one week of history. As a result, attempts to retrieve older blocks, transactions, or account states frequently lead to missing or incomplete responses.

These limitations have long posed practical challenges for use cases that depend on historical data, including on-chain analytics, long-term behavior analysis, backtesting, auditing, and research.

Traditionally, operating an archive node has been regarded as the primary method for accessing the full Solana ledger history. However, this approach requires massive data replication, lengthy initial synchronization, and ongoing high operational costs.

Archive configurations based on Google Cloud Bigtable, in particular, involve substantial data migration costs at deployment and continue to incur significant expenses during operation. For many developers and organizations, this has made such solutions impractical. Moreover, strong dependence on a single cloud provider has also raised concerns from the perspective of decentralization, which is a fundamental principle of blockchain systems.

Old Faithful is an open-source archive infrastructure designed to address these challenges within the Solana ecosystem. It generates and serves historical archives in the Content Addressable Archives (CAR) format from RocksDB archives produced by Solana warehouse nodes.

In the CAR format, each epoch, block, transaction, and shred is uniquely identified by a content hash. This enables verifiable integrity checks, allowing users to confirm that retrieved data has not been tampered with, even when obtained from untrusted distribution sources.

Old Faithful is designed to handle the complete Solana ledger history, from genesis to the present, and supports a wide range of distribution methods, including HTTP, CDNs, and distributed storage systems.

By integrating Old Faithful into its Solana RPC infrastructure, ERPC enables historical data access through the existing Solana RPC interface. Historical data comes from the same edge.erpc.global endpoint and the same Solana RPC methods as recent data; a request asks for history access by adding history=true to the endpoint URL.

This upgrade has been applied uniformly across all ERPC regions, ensuring consistent historical data availability regardless of geographic location. Even in globally distributed deployments, users can rely on the same historical data coverage across regions.

Due to the inherently large size of historical data, certain queries may take longer to complete compared to queries for the most recent data. This behavior reflects structural characteristics of historical data access and does not indicate system faults or performance degradation.

ERPC continues to pursue research and development aimed at improving response times for historical data retrieval, including evaluations of configurations using next-generation large-capacity NVMe storage. Incremental optimizations will be introduced based on insights gained from real-world operation.

With this upgrade, ERPC’s Solana RPC now supports a broader range of use cases beyond real-time applications. Long-term analytics, historical verification, research, auditing, and application behavior analysis can now be performed without the need for additional infrastructure.

Providing historical data access as a natural extension of standard RPC usage significantly expands the practical applicability of ERPC’s Solana RPC services.

To read older blocks and transactions, add history=true to the edge.erpc.global endpoint URL of an HTTP request. Except for getTransactionsForAddress, a request without history=true is answered from the recent range each node holds.

An HTTP request can carry the API key in the URL:

https://edge.erpc.global?api-key=<YOUR_API_KEY>&history=true

https://edge.erpc.global?api-key=<YOUR_API_KEY>&history=true

Or the API key goes in an Authorization header, with history=true in the URL:

https://edge.erpc.global?history=true

https://edge.erpc.global?history=true

The header is Authorization: Bearer <YOUR_API_KEY>.

ERPC RPC Documentation: https://erpc.global/en/doc/rpc/general/

Except for getTransactionsForAddress in "full" mode, a call answered by history access costs 640 tokens more than its method’s regular price, and a call answered from the recent range each node holds keeps its regular price, even with history=true. getTransactionsForAddress in "full" mode costs its regular price plus 640 tokens for each transaction fetched, recent or old. Free allowances, including the Free plan’s, have a limit for history access.

A lookup in historical data may take much longer than a regular request, in some cases seconds. ERPC offers history access as a separate option that keeps lookups in historical data apart from regular requests, so that regular requests stay fast.

Users can obtain and check their ERPC API key on the ERPC Web Dashboard.

Validators DAO Official Discord: https://discord.gg/C7ZQSrCkYR
ERPC Official Website: https://erpc.global/en