Alibaba’s Bold Move: Can Solana Handle the Heat of High-Performance RPCs?

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On a rather unremarkable Wednesday, as the bustling city of Hong Kong buzzed with its usual fervor, a moment of technological enlightenment emerged. It was during a keynote address that Alibaba Cloud, in its infinite wisdom, decided to grace the world with a demonstration of what they amusingly dubbed “high-performance” Solana RPC connectivity. One could almost hear the collective gasp of developers everywhere, as if someone had just revealed the secret to eternal youth.

In a clip that danced across Solana’s official X account like a fleeting shadow, the esteemed Zhao Qingyuan from Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Group took center stage during an event grandly titled “Fueling Web3 Innovation with AI on Cloud.” How splendid! One could only speculate how many cups of coffee were consumed while brainstorming that title. Zhao’s mission was clear: to reduce latency and operational overhead for those industrious builders who dare to rely on swift, dependable RPC access. After all, in the cutthroat world of trading, every millisecond counts-at least that’s what they say over drinks.

Alibaba Struts Its Stuff with Solana RPC Throughput

With a flair that would make even the most seasoned orators envious, Zhao illustrated how large language models can miraculously compress development cycles. He regaled the audience with tales of his weekend escapades-yes, you heard it right, a weekend spent migrating an archive node from Google Bigtable to Alibaba Cloud’s own database. “I haven’t even learned Rust before,” he quipped, “yet here I am, coding my way to glory in just two days!” Ah, the joys of modern technology, where ignorance is no barrier to achievement.

“And it will download the data from Hugging Face for the historical slots, and it will synchronize the data with the mainnet, and it can provide the RPC service,” he boasted. The room must have been filled with nods of approval, or perhaps disbelief-who knew coding could be so effortlessly heroic?

Yet, the pièce de résistance was undoubtedly the latency claim. Zhao, perhaps channeling his inner magician, unveiled a setup whereby users would connect to RPC nodes through Alibaba Cloud’s backbone network, eschewing the common routes of the public internet. A daring move indeed!

In a table that surely dazzled the eyes, he proclaimed a “get slot” RPC call latency reduction from around 25 milliseconds to an astounding 10 milliseconds. “A huge reduction!” he exclaimed, as if he were announcing the birth of a new star. For the “get block,” boasting a 4MB payload, latency fell from “more than 200 milliseconds” to a more palatable “less than 200 milliseconds.” Stability and suitability for low-latency workloads were emphasized, leaving little room for doubt-or perhaps just room for laughter at the absurdity of such precise measurements.

JUST IN: Alibaba, the world’s largest ecommerce company, demos high-performance Solana RPCs

– Solana (@solana) February 11, 2026

Moreover, Alibaba Cloud couldn’t resist flaunting its geographical prowess. Zhao pointed out the firm’s sprawling global presence, from Frankfurt to the US, and numerous Asia-Pacific hubs including Tokyo, Singapore, and Hong Kong. “A perfect match,” he declared, for Solana’s builder base and its ever-hungry latency-sensitive applications. Who knew geography could be so thrilling?

While the clip tantalizingly stopped short of revealing a formal partnership or a productized Solana RPC offering, complete with pricing or SLAs, the optics were nonetheless striking. A major cloud provider taking to the Solana ecosystem stage to publicly benchmark RPC latency improvements? Now that’s a plot twist worthy of the finest Russian literature! As the press release rolled in, SOL danced at a modest $81, leaving one to ponder the whims of fate in this ever-evolving digital landscape.

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2026-02-11 15:41