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RPC Visibility Report - September 2026

A monthly look at Ethereum block visibility across six monitored regions: where blocks appeared first, when regional lag persisted, and which blocks had the widest cross-region visibility spreads.

Key Findings

  • First-seen leadership spread out: US-East still led at 46.12%, but its share fell 10.35 percentage points from August. EU-West gained 8.31 points, the largest increase among the six regions.
  • The usual regional gap widened slightly: the median visibility gap was 118 ms, up 7 ms from 109 ms in August.
  • One block became a major outlier: the widest regional spread reached 29.84 s, compared with 1.56 s in August. It took almost half a minute to appear across all monitored regions, about 252x the monthly median.
  • The lag hotspot moved to US-Central: it appeared in all three highlighted windows. In the worst window, 13 of 150 blocks arrived more than 500 ms after the fastest region, with a 7.28 s p95 lag and a 30.71 s maximum.
Top First-Seen Share
46.12%
US-East across 6 monitored regions
Largest Regional Visibility Spread
29.8s
~252x the 118 ms median regional gap
Median Regional Visibility Gap
118 ms
up 7 ms from last month
Coverage: 222,352 blocks were observed across all monitored regions.

1. Regional First-Seen

For each block, QuantLoop reports which monitored region observed the block first.

How to read this
Expand

This section answers: which monitored region observed each new Ethereum block first?
Because each region has multiple monitored providers, QuantLoop uses the earliest observation recorded inside each region.

Values labeled "pts vs last month" show the percentage-point change from the previous monthly report.

First-Seen Share by Region
Share of blocks first observed by each monitored region.
US-East46.12%-10.35 pts vs last month
EU-West12.70%+8.31 pts vs last month
EU-Central23.92%+2.32 pts vs last month
AP-Northeast13.09%-1.28 pts vs last month
US-Central3.29%+1.62 pts vs last month
US-West0.85%+0.63 pts vs last month

2. Elevated Regional Lag

Time windows where one region repeatedly received blocks later than the fastest region.

How to read this
Expand

This section highlights detected lag windows where one region repeatedly received blocks later than the fastest region.

Each row covers one detected lag window. QuantLoop counts how many blocks in that window were delayed by more than a threshold for the listed region.

Share shows how much of the window was affected. Higher share means more persistent lag.

Highlighted regional lag windows
Detected windows with repeated regional lag, including the threshold and share of blocks affected.
Rank #1
US-Central
2026-09-19 02:48 → 03:18 UTC
Delayed
8.67%

13 / 150 blocks were delayed >500ms

P95 lag

7.28s

Max lag

30.71s

Rank #2
US-Central
2026-09-18 23:38 → 00:08 UTC
Delayed
6.21%

9 / 145 blocks were delayed >500ms

P95 lag

1.31s

Max lag

14.74s

Rank #3
US-Central
2026-09-02 03:31 → 04:01 UTC
Delayed
6%

9 / 150 blocks were delayed >500ms

P95 lag

634ms

Max lag

30.30s

3. Largest Regional Visibility Spreads

Blocks with the widest timing gap between the first region that saw the block and the last region that saw it.

How to read this
Expand

This section answers a simple question: for the same block, how far apart were the first regional observations?

For each block, QuantLoop takes the earliest observation within each region. Regional visibility spread is the time between the earliest regional first-seen timestamp and the latest regional first-seen timestamp.

Largest regional visibility spreads
Single-hash blocks with the widest first-seen spread across monitored regions.
Rank #1
0xf3e0af…e36b46
Spread
29.84s
Rank #2
0x344cc5…38d7f5
Spread
29.35s
Rank #3
0x91d4d8…fe46b9
Spread
29.1s