Why Your RPC Provider Matters More Than You Think

If you've built anything on a blockchain, you've dealt with RPC endpoints. They're one of those things that seem trivial until they aren't - and then suddenly a flaky provider is the reason your transactions are failing, your frontend is showing stale data, and you're spending an afternoon debugging a problem that isn't even in your code.

We've been there. That's a big part of why we built Boar Network's RPC service.

The infrastructure you forget about - until it breaks

Every time your application reads a balance, submits a transaction, or fetches a block, it's making an RPC call. It's the most fundamental piece of infrastructure in any blockchain project - and it's the one most developers spend the least time thinking about.

Here's what typically happens: you grab a free endpoint from whoever shows up first in a Google search, hardcode it into your config, and move on. It works fine for a while. Then your app gets real users, or you start deploying across multiple chains, and things start breaking in ways that are hard to diagnose.

Timeouts that come and go. Rate limits you didn't know existed. Inconsistent responses between providers on different chains. The kind of problems where the error message tells you nothing useful.

So we built our own - and opened it up

Boar Network runs RPC infrastructure for Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Mezo, with more chains coming. We're not a reseller - we run our own nodes, contribute to protocol development, and participate in governance on the networks we support. We understand these chains because we help build them.

The service works through a simple model: you sign up at the Boar Dashboard, generate a key, and your endpoints are live. The URL format is straightforward:

https://<network-name>.boar.network/<your-key>

One dashboard, one key management system, multiple chains. No juggling separate providers for each network.

From sign-up to first response

Once you have your key, you can test it immediately:

curl \
    -X POST \
    https://<network-name>.boar.network/<your-key> \
    -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
    -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","method":"eth_blockNumber","params":[],"id":1}'

That's a standard JSON-RPC call asking for the latest block number. You should get a response back in single-digit milliseconds. Nothing special, but that consistency is the point.

Drop it into whatever you're already using

The integration looks the same as any other RPC provider, which is intentional. You shouldn't have to refactor anything to switch.

Hardhat - add your networks to hardhat.config.js:

module.exports = {
  networks: {
    mezo: {
      url: "https://<network-name>.boar.network/<your-key>",
      accounts: [process.env.PRIVATE_KEY],
    },
    ethereum: {
      url: "https://<network-name>.boar.network/<your-key>",
      accounts: [process.env.PRIVATE_KEY],
    },
  },
};

viem:

import { createPublicClient, http } from "viem";

const client = createPublicClient({
  transport: http("https://<network-name>.boar.network/<your-key>"),
});

const blockNumber = await client.getBlockNumber();
console.log("Current block:", blockNumber);

ethers.js:

import { JsonRpcProvider } from "ethers";

const provider = new JsonRpcProvider(
  "https://<network-name>.boar.network/<your-key>"
);

const block = await provider.getBlockNumber();
console.log("Current block:", block);

The point is: it's a standard RPC endpoint. If your tooling speaks JSON-RPC, it works with Boar.

What about when traffic gets real?

One thing worth mentioning: switching RPC providers in a running project is one of those tasks that should take five minutes and somehow takes a full day. You're updating configs across environments, touching CI pipelines, and hoping nothing quietly breaks.

We thought about this early on. Contact us to receive a free Enterprise plan for the duration of your migration. No need to switch applications all at once. Migrate without double-spending.

What are we missing?

We're actively expanding to more networks and improving the service based on what developers actually need. If there's a chain you want us to support, or something about the developer experience that could be smoother, we'd genuinely like to hear about it.

You can reach us here or find us on the channels listed on our site. We read everything.