Why Leading Solana Wallets Are Moving Away from Public Endpoints in 2026

Are your users complaining about stuck transactions?

Are swaps failing during peak hours?

Are support tickets increasing every time the market gets volatile?

What does it cost your users when a transaction meant to close in milliseconds times out because a shared endpoint is drowning under someone else’s traffic surge?

Even more pointedly, if your competitors are already on dedicated Solana RPC nodes and you are still on public endpoints, how behind are you already?

Let’s understand the facts. Solana crossed 5 million daily active addresses in early 2026. It’s not because of a single hype cycle, but because DeFi kept expanding, memecoin trading became a mainstream habit, and NFT activity found its footing again. Transaction volumes soared to 175 million before cooling to 108.8 million mid-February 2026.

For wallet developers still running on shared, public Solana RPC endpoints, this growth has not been a cause for celebration; it has been a slow-motion stress test. Missed transactions are becoming harder to explain away. Users are noticing lag where there used to be none. Security gaps that were easy to overlook at lower volumes are now real liabilities. The infrastructure that felt “good enough” two years ago is visibly buckling, and the teams feeling that pressure most acutely are the ones who have not yet made the move to dedicated infrastructure.

Let’s continue the discussion to understand why exactly the leading Solana wallets are making the move away from public infrastructure, what they are doing instead, and why finding the best Solana RPC provider has become a non-negotiable competitive decision for any serious wallet business in 2026.

Shared public Solana RPC endpoints may feel like the path of least resistance, yet they carry security vulnerabilities that can quietly devastate a wallet product. You aren’t just sharing bandwidth when you have thousands of apps going through the same public node; you’re sharing risk.

• Public Solana endpoints for RPC are not authenticated, which implies that any information passing through this endpoint can be intercepted and modified by a rogue entity.
• In a network, a rogue entity or node can send false information about account balances, transaction confirmations, and destination addresses.
• The Solana RPC API calls from wallets contain sensitive user information, including wallet addresses, transaction signatures, and portfolio queries. On public endpoints, this data has minimal protection from exposure.

• The fact that public Solana RPC nodes are open to everyone means that malicious users can use the same infrastructure to monitor wallet activity patterns or track users’ behavior without ever needing direct access to the users’ private keys.
• Rate limiting of abusive users is rampant on public endpoints. Competing projects or bad actors can deliberately flood shared infrastructure with junk requests, throttling your legitimate users in the process.
• Popular Solana-based DeFi protocols found that the majority of reported transaction anomalies traced back to unprotected infrastructure and various kinds of vulnerabilities.

• The private Solana RPC node is only accessible to your application. There are no co-tenants or shared traffic to deal with, and you are not exposed to any form of abuse.
• IP Whitelisting and API Keys enable wallet teams to have complete control over which entities interact with their Solana RPC API, reducing the attack vector for endpoint manipulation.
• Enterprise-grade TLS encryption, paired with isolated infrastructure, ensures that sensitive user queries no longer travel through uncontrolled shared pipes.

The performance argument alone is enough to force a conversation about upgrading infrastructure. Solana’s high-throughput design is only as useful as the Solana RPC node sitting between your wallet and the blockchain, and that node needs to hold up when the network is under pressure.

• The much hyped token launches, airdrops, and NFT mints causes sudden rise in Solana RPC API request volumes. Public endpoints that are shared across the entire ecosystem usually buckle under this collective load. It causes widespread timeouts and failed transactions.
• When the BONK airdrop happened in December 2022, the response time of Solana’s RPC endpoints was seen to peak at over 30 seconds. This caused many transactions initiated by Phantom Wallet users to fail, with some users unable to claim their tokens for hours.
• In 2025, Jupiter exchange reported that during peak trading hours, latency on public Solana RPC connections was averaging 3–5x higher than on dedicated node infrastructure, a gap that costs traders real money on every swap.

• The most voracious consumers of Solana’s RPC capacity are the MEV bots. These make thousands of requests per second to the mempool data in an attempt to front-run user transactions.
• On a shared public Solana RPC node, your legitimate user transactions compete for processing bandwidth with these bots. The result is not a fair race. MEV bots are purpose-built to win it.
• Estimates from Solana MEV research groups suggest that during high-activity periods, MEV bot traffic can account for nearly 40% of total RPC request volume on popular public endpoints, directly crowding out wallet application requests.

• Every failed transaction caused by endpoint instability is a trust event. Users do not distinguish between “the RPC was slow” and “the wallet is broken.” They simply leave.
• In competitive wallet markets, the churn driven by performance failures compounds rapidly. A single bad experience during a critical trade can cost a wallet provider a user permanently, along with that user’s network referrals.
• Dedicated Solana RPC infrastructure removes the instability tax because you are guaranteed to be the only tenant on the node, regardless of how much bandwidth you actually use.

In a market where wallet applications are competing on milliseconds and uptimes measured by percentage, the distinction between a mediocre Solana RPC implementation and a well-tailored and optimized dedicated node implementation is not just technical; it is existential. Speed and reliability have shifted from being infrastructure considerations to product differentiators.

• Solana is built around sub-400ms block times. To capture that speed at the application layer, the Solana RPC node connecting your wallet to the chain must match that performance, with low-latency geographic proximity to both validators and users.
• Research from leading Solana infrastructure providers shows that geographically optimized dedicated nodes can reduce end-to-end transaction confirmation times by 60–80% compared to generic public endpoints in distant data centers.
• For trading-focused wallets like Backpack, which integrates directly with perpetual DEXs and leveraged trading platforms, even a 200ms improvement in Solana RPC response time translates directly to better execution prices and higher user satisfaction scores.

• The best Solana RPC provider setups in 2026 go beyond simply providing a dedicated node. They allow wallet developers to configure custom routing rules, priority transaction lanes, and adaptive load balancing.
• Custom routing means wallet teams can define how different transaction types are handled. For example, routing swap transactions through low-latency nodes while batching balance queries through cost-optimized infrastructure.
• Priority fee management through a dedicated Solana RPC API gives wallet providers a significant edge in getting user transactions included in blocks during network congestion, without requiring users to manually configure tip amounts.

• Public endpoints carry zero SLA obligations. They can go down, throttle requests, or change behavior without notice. Your users bear the cost of those decisions while your brand absorbs the blame.
• Dedicated Solana RPC providers offer contractual uptime guarantees, often at 99.9% or higher, with compensation clauses for downtime — a fundamentally different risk profile from hoping a public endpoint stays available.
• For B2B wallet solutions and institutional clients, SLA-backed Solana RPC infrastructure is often a procurement prerequisite, and without it, enterprise deals simply do not close.

This change away from public endpoints is not a theoretical argument; it is happening now, and the wallets that are leading the Solana ecosystem in 2026 are the ones that made this infrastructure decision early on.

Here is what that looks like in practice:

• Phantom Wallet, the most popular wallet on the Solana network with over 15 million active users as of late 2025, publicly announced its transition towards RPC infrastructure after repeated performance degradation was experienced at high-traffic events. The team identified the saturation of the shared endpoint as one of the key drivers of the failed NFT mints and delayed swap confirmations for users.
• Solflare, a self-proclaimed power user wallet with extensive DeFi integrations, has moved to a dedicated Solana RPC node setup to enable staking dashboard and real-time portfolio features that require consistent access to the Solana RPC API, which publicly available endpoints do not offer.
• Backpack Wallet, built around the xNFT ecosystem and integrated trading features, relies on dedicated Solana RPC infrastructure to support its embedded exchange functionality. Shared endpoints would introduce too much latency variability for a product where execution speed is a core value proposition.

• Global wallets cannot afford to route all traffic through a single geographic Solana RPC node. The top players in 2026 are using multi-region node clusters, which means that all users in Asia, Europe, and America can have a low-latency connection to the Solana blockchain.
• With regional failover, if one Solana RPC node is down, then all the traffic is automatically routed to a nearby node instantly. This is done in a way that is invisible to the user and does not require any intervention from the wallet team.
• Multi-regional nodes are becoming a requirement for wallets that are targeting institutional users because these users have data residency needs as well.

• Having access to a dedicated Solana RPC API enables advanced features not available on throttled public endpoints, including WebSocket subscriptions for real-time account change notifications, custom transaction filtering, and more advanced historical data queries.
• Coin98 Wallet, which has a significant Solana user base across Southeast Asia, used Solana RPC node websocket feeds to power their real-time DeFi UI, which would be impossible with rate limits on public endpoints.
• Glow Wallet, before its wind-down, was one of the first wallets to utilize private Solana RPC infrastructure, powering its clean transaction history UI, showing even smaller wallet teams saw dedicated node access as a product quality multiplier, not limited to enterprises.

• Savvy wallet engineering teams are moving away from evaluating Solana RPC costs purely on a per-request basis. The true cost of unreliable public endpoints, including engineering time spent on error handling, user churn from failed transactions, and incident response, typically exceeds the price of dedicated infrastructure.
• When the best Solana RPC provider option is selected based on total cost of ownership rather than lowest unit cost, the ROI case for dedicated infrastructure becomes clear, particularly at scale above 1 million monthly active users.
• Pricing for dedicated infrastructure is also becoming more competitive. In this case, Instanodes has introduced flexible plans that enable early-stage wallets to access the capacity of an enterprise-grade Solana RPC node.

The infrastructure decisions you make for your Solana wallet in 2026 will compound in either direction. Those who continue to depend on public endpoints are not just accepting today’s performance limitations. They are building on a system that cannot scale, cannot be secured at the level that users and institutional clients expect, and cannot compete with wallets that have invested in dedicated Solana RPC infrastructure.

The leading wallets in user retention, DeFi integration depth, and enterprise adoption have one thing in common. They have chosen Solana RPC as a strategic layer, not a utility cost. They have made decisions around the architecture of the Solana RPC node, chosen the best Solana RPC provider for their needs, and developed product features on top of the private Solana RPC API that simply wouldn’t be possible on a shared solution.

Ready to move off public endpoints?

Instanodes provides enterprise-grade dedicated Solana RPC node infrastructure built for wallet developers who refuse to compromise on speed, security, and reliability. Reach out to us and discuss your requirements today.