Every trade of $RELAY pays a creator fee. The fees pay the upstream bill. The endpoint is open to anyone. Hold $RELAY and your ceiling goes up.
The signal above is drawn from live throughput. It moves faster and swells wider the more requests the proxy is actually serving.
relay/rpc
Health checks run against the upstream route in real time. This page shows what Relay can reach right now, not a promise of uptime.
No provider result yet.
No provider result yet.
Relay checks the primary RPC before reporting its status. Safe read requests can use the backup when the primary is unavailable or quota-limited.
Relay is community-operated infrastructure. Keep a backup RPC for production-critical systems and never put private keys in requests or browser code.
Any wallet with ETH or $RELAY can claim a key. Its tier follows the $RELAY balance in the wallet you submit, moving up or down on the next check with no subscription and no deposit held here.
/rpc endpoint is still open at 10 requests per second.Already have a rly_… key? Look up its current tier, daily usage, and remaining allowance. This does not expose the wallet's private credentials.
It is a normal EVM JSON-RPC endpoint. Anything that talks to an Ethereum-compatible node talks to this.
Same endpoint, your key on the end. The key decides your rate limit and nothing else changes.
No key at all still works — every request without one is metered per IP address on the
free drip tier shown below. A key only exists to raise that ceiling and tie it
to a wallet instead of an IP.
Every response, success or refusal, carries the same headers so you can build real handling around them instead of guessing from the status code alone.
x-relay-tier which tier served the requestx-relay-ms how long the upstream call actually tookx-relay-request-id unique id for this request, useful when reporting an issuex-ratelimit-limit your tier's requests-per-second ceilingx-ratelimit-remaining burst allowance left this instantx-ratelimit-reset seconds until the burst allowance refillsYour tier is decided by how much $RELAY the wallet behind
your key holds, checked live on every request — not by anything stored here. Full detail is
on the tiers page; here is the short version.
| tier | requests / sec | daily cap | needs | unlocks |
|---|
429 over your requests per second, or your daily cap. The message says which.403 the method is blocked, or needs a higher tier.401 unknown key.402 the wallet behind that key no longer holds enough.502 upstream did not answer. Not your fault.Batches are allowed up to 20 calls, and a batch costs its full size against the rate limit, so batching is not a way around the limiter.
Refusals are plain JSON-RPC errors, same shape you would get from any node:
{
"jsonrpc": "2.0",
"id": null,
"error": { "code": -32005, "message": "rate limit, 10 requests per second on drip" }
}
| status | code | meaning |
|---|---|---|
| 401 | -32001 | unknown key |
| 402 | -32002 | the wallet behind that key dropped below the stream tier's holding requirement |
| 403 | -32003 | method is blocked outright (see below) |
| 403 | -32004 | method needs at least the current tier |
| 429 | -32005 | over your requests-per-second ceiling |
| 429 | -32006 | daily request cap reached for your tier |
| 502 | -32007 | upstream did not answer in time |
eth_getLogs is blocked outright. Historical log queries are expensive to give away through a free endpoint
and a free endpoint offering it would be drained by one person in an afternoon. Heavy history
methods need at least the current tier:
No. The /rpc endpoint with no key works immediately, metered per IP on the free
drip tier. A key just raises the ceiling and requires no signup either —
only the wallet address you want it bound to.
Your key is re-priced against your live balance on every request. Buy more and the next request lands in the higher tier; sell below a threshold and the very next request drops to whatever tier your balance actually supports. Nothing to renew, nothing to cancel.
Relay automatically fails over between its configured upstream providers for safe, read-only requests, and the status page shows real upstream health. That said, it is a community-run service funded by trading fees, not a paid SLA — keep your own fallback RPC configured for anything mission-critical.
No. A JSON-RPC batch of N calls costs N against your per-second limit, the same as sending them one at a time. Batches are capped at 20 calls.
Most of what follows is one idea stretched out into an argument, plus the receipts to back it. The numbers below are live — they are the actual case being made.
Every Relay token trade can fund the creator wallet and the RPC infrastructure behind this service. The fee stream becomes a transparent operating budget instead of idle wallet balance.
Meanwhile everyone building on Robinhood Chain pays for RPC, or suffers on the public endpoint that rate limits you into uselessness the moment anyone actually uses the thing you built.
So point one at the other. Trades pay the fee, the fee pays the upstream bill, the endpoint is free. Nobody using it pays anything, because the traders already paid, and they would have paid it either way into a wallet that did nothing.
Every project says the fees go somewhere. You are supposed to take their word for it, check a wallet once, and never look again. So the numbers here are the ones that would expose it if that were not true: requests actually served, dollars actually spent upstream, treasury balance read live off chain, and runway, which is treasury divided by daily burn.
Runway is the only number that tells you whether this survives, so it is on the front page instead of buried in a docs tab.
Volume up, the limits rise and the upstream plan gets bigger. Volume down, they come back in. You cannot promise fixed capacity on variable income. Anyone who does is going to break the promise or drain the treasury, usually both, in that order.
The treasury is an operator wallet. A person claims the creator fees into it and pays the provider out of it. The balance and the spend are on this page and checkable against the chain, so the arithmetic can be verified by anyone who cares to. That is transparent. It is not trustless, and calling it trustless would be a lie.
relay is a proxy in front of one or two commercial RPC providers. If every configured upstream goes down, this goes down.
Not investment advice.