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Alchemy Adds Stellar Support: What It Means for RPC Infrastructure Competition

On April 16, 2026, Alchemy announced support for the Stellar network. Alchemy is one of the largest blockchain infrastructure providers, serving over 100 million end users across Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, and other chains. Adding Stellar to their platform is a validation of the network's growing developer demand and a signal that the RPC infrastructure market for Stellar is maturing.

What Alchemy Announced

Alchemy's Stellar support includes:

  • Horizon API access: Proxied access to Stellar's historical data API
  • Soroban RPC access: JSON-RPC endpoints for smart contract interactions
  • Enhanced APIs: Alchemy's proprietary APIs for transfers, balances, and token metadata
  • Dashboard: Usage analytics, alerts, and webhook integrations

    • This puts Alchemy alongside the existing options for managed Stellar infrastructure: SDF's public endpoints, Blockdaemon, Validation Cloud, and LumenQuery.

    The RPC Infrastructure Landscape for Stellar

    Before Alchemy's entry, Stellar developers had several options:

    ProviderHorizon APISoroban RPCRate LimitsPricing
    **SDF Public**YesYes~5 req/sFree
    **Self-hosted**YesYesUnlimitedServer costs
    **Blockdaemon**YesYesTier-basedEnterprise
    **Validation Cloud**YesYesTier-basedEnterprise
    **LumenQuery**YesYesTier-basedFrom $0/mo
    **Alchemy** (new)YesYesTier-basedFrom $0/mo

    Alchemy's entry validates that Stellar has enough developer demand to justify investment from a major infrastructure player.

    How Alchemy Compares

    Strengths

  • Multi-chain experience: Alchemy has years of experience running blockchain infrastructure at scale
  • Developer tooling: Webhooks, enhanced APIs, and monitoring dashboards
  • Brand recognition: Many developers already use Alchemy for Ethereum
  • Scale: Infrastructure designed for billions of requests

    • Considerations

  • Stellar-specific features: Alchemy's enhanced APIs are primarily designed for EVM chains. Stellar-specific features like DEX order books, path payments, and asset authorization may not be fully covered
  • Soroban depth: Stellar's smart contract platform has unique characteristics (state archival, TTL management) that generic infrastructure may not optimize for
  • Pricing at scale: Alchemy's compute unit pricing can become expensive for high-volume Stellar applications
  • Support for Stellar idioms: Features like streaming (SSE), cursor-based pagination, and Stellar-specific error handling

    • What This Means for Developers

    More Choice Is Good

    Competition drives better infrastructure:

  • Better uptime: Providers compete on reliability
  • Lower prices: More competition pushes costs down
  • Better features: Each provider differentiates with unique capabilities
  • Less vendor lock-in: Standard APIs make switching easier

    • Choose Based on Your Needs

    If You Need...Consider
    Multi-chain support (Ethereum + Stellar)Alchemy
    Stellar-specific analytics and monitoringLumenQuery
    Enterprise SLA with dedicated supportBlockdaemon, Validation Cloud
    Free tier for prototypingSDF Public, LumenQuery, Alchemy
    Soroban contract explorer and decoded dataLumenQuery
    Maximum controlSelf-hosted

    The Case for Stellar-Focused Infrastructure

    Generic multi-chain providers serve a broad market. Stellar-focused providers like LumenQuery serve the Stellar market deeply. The difference shows up in several areas:

    1. Analytics and Monitoring

    LumenQuery provides Stellar network analytics out of the box: TPS, ledger health, fee trends, token velocity, and whale tracking. Generic providers typically offer request-level metrics (how many API calls you made) but not network-level insights.

    2. Smart Contract Explorer

    LumenQuery's Soroban Pro decodes XDR, shows human-readable contract calls, provides storage viewers, and streams contract events. This is Stellar-specific tooling that generic providers do not offer.

    3. Transaction Intelligence

    Real-time transaction monitoring with decoded operations, watchlists, and alerts designed for Stellar's operation types. A generic webhook service does not understand Stellar's path payments, trustline changes, or Soroban invocations.

    4. Portfolio and Compliance

    Portfolio Intelligence and compliance tools designed for Stellar's asset model, including trustline risk assessment, multi-account aggregation, and yield tracking from Soroban DeFi.

    Impact on the Stellar Ecosystem

    Validation

    Alchemy entering the Stellar market is a strong signal:

  • Stellar has enough developer demand to justify investment
  • The Soroban smart contract platform is attracting multi-chain developers
  • RWA tokenization on Stellar is creating enterprise infrastructure demand
  • SDF's ecosystem growth strategy is working

    • Developer Growth

    More infrastructure options lower the barrier to building on Stellar:

  • Ethereum developers already using Alchemy can add Stellar features with minimal friction
  • Multi-chain applications can use a single provider for both chains
  • Better infrastructure attracts more developers, creating a positive feedback loop

    • What Comes Next

    If history repeats from the Ethereum infrastructure market:

  • More providers enter: QuickNode, Infura, and others may follow
  • Prices decrease: Competition pushes free tiers higher and paid tiers lower
  • Features converge: Basic API access becomes commoditized
  • Specialization wins: Providers differentiate through unique features and domain expertise

    • How to Evaluate RPC Providers

    When choosing infrastructure for your Stellar application:

    1. Latency        - How fast are responses? (< 100ms for cached, < 500ms for uncached)
2. Uptime         - What is the SLA? (99.9% minimum for production)
3. Rate limits    - Do limits match your usage pattern?
4. Stellar depth  - Does the provider understand Stellar-specific features?
5. Pricing        - What does it cost at your expected scale?
6. Support        - Can you get help when something breaks?
7. Tooling        - Analytics, monitoring, debugging tools?
8. Lock-in risk   - How easy is it to switch providers?

    Since Horizon and Soroban RPC have standard APIs, switching providers is straightforward — just change the base URL. The differentiator is everything above and beyond the raw API: analytics, monitoring, decoded data, and developer experience.

    LumenQuery's Position

    LumenQuery was built for Stellar from day one. While we welcome competition from Alchemy and others, our focus remains on being the best infrastructure provider for teams building specifically on Stellar:

  • Managed Horizon API with sub-100ms response times
  • Soroban RPC with contract deployment and decoded event streaming
  • Network analytics with real-time metrics and historical data
  • Developer tools including natural language queries, portfolio tracking, and transaction monitoring

    • *Build on Stellar with infrastructure that understands the network. LumenQuery provides managed Horizon API, Soroban RPC, analytics, and monitoring designed specifically for Stellar developers. Start free.*