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

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

2025.12.29
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.
With this upgrade, all Solana RPC endpoints provided by ERPC now support gapless access to historical Solana data across all regions. This functionality is available to all existing ERPC RPC plan users without requiring any additional contracts or special configuration.
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.

Structural Challenges of Historical Data Access in Solana RPC

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.

Practical Limitations of Conventional Archive Approaches

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.

The Historical Data Distribution Model Enabled by Old Faithful

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.

Old Faithful Integration Within ERPC

By integrating Old Faithful into its Solana RPC infrastructure, ERPC enables historical data access through the existing Solana RPC interface. No new APIs or dedicated endpoints are required, and users can retrieve complete historical data using the same RPC queries as before.
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.

Performance Characteristics and Ongoing Research and Development

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.

Expanded Scope of Supported Use Cases

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.

Usage

This functionality is available to all users currently subscribed to ERPC RPC plans, without any additional procedures or configuration.
Access information is provided via the Validators DAO official Discord.
Validators DAO Official Discord: https://discord.gg/C7ZQSrCkYR
ERPC Official Website: https://erpc.global/en