StreamingFast

Powering real-time Web3 data at global scale

StreamingFast, based in Montreal, builds high-performance infrastructure for blockchain data. As a core contributor to The Graph — an indexing protocol that helps developers query blockchain data more easily — the company plays a key role in the Web3 data stack. Its technologies, Firehose and Substreams, help teams ingest, process and stream blockchain data at scale.

Today, StreamingFast supports more than 30 blockchains and serves DEXs, DeFi protocols, analytics platforms and trading firms across North America, Europe and Asia. It gives developers fast, reliable access to blockchain data, so they can focus on building.

As demand for real-time indexing grew, StreamingFast needed infrastructure that could keep up. It had to handle high IOPS, heavy peer-to-peer traffic and constant data propagation, while keeping both performance and costs under control.

Handling more data, at more speed, without losing reliability

StreamingFast helps customers access blockchain data quickly and at scale. That sounds simple. In practice, it is anything but.

Its platform runs custom-instrumented full nodes with specialised tracers. These extract blockchain data into Protobuf blocks, which then feed Firehose, StreamingFast’s indexing engine. Customers can read directly from Firehose or use Substreams to transform and route blockchain data to more than 20 destinations.

This architecture gives customers a clear advantage. It is streaming-first, not polling-based. It handles chain reorganisations out of the box. It also includes a built-in cursoring system, so data streams can resume quickly after a disconnection. In other words, users do not miss data.

That promise matters. StreamingFast serves DEXs, DeFi protocols, analytics platforms, smart contract developers, decentralised applications and trading firms. These customers need complete and accurate blockchain data, delivered with low latency, across many protocols.

As demand grew, so did the pressure on infrastructure. StreamingFast needed fast and reliable reader nodes with large local NVMe storage, strong availability and good redundancy. It also needed unmetered bandwidth to support the heavy egress generated by blockchain peer-to-peer traffic.

At the same time, the company wanted to improve blockchain head latency, speed up historical backfills and reduce infrastructure costs.

Our operational risks were downtime, delays in block and data propagation, and connectivity issues.

Matthieu Vachon, CTO at StreamingFast

Bare Metal built for high-performance blockchain workloads

StreamingFast started using OVHcloud Bare Metal around a year ago.

The fit was clear from the start. The company needed dedicated machines with strong disk I/O performance, low latency and a pricing model that made sense for large-scale blockchain workloads. OVHcloud delivered on all three.

For StreamingFast, disk performance is mission-critical. Blockchain reader nodes need fast local storage to stay in sync, process data quickly and support reprocessing at scale. Network traffic matters just as much, especially when nodes generate high volumes of peer-to-peer communication.

OVHcloud Bare Metal gave StreamingFast the hardware profile it needed, along with unmetered ingress and egress traffic. It also helped the company lower costs without compromising performance.

We had high trust in OVHcloud for providing great Bare Metal services at a fraction of the cost we were paying to GCP for the same level of service.

Matthieu Vachon, CTO at StreamingFast

The rollout itself was straightforward. StreamingFast moved part of its architecture to OVHcloud with no disruption for customers and very little pressure on the internal DevOps team. The migration was simple, the machines proved easy to operate, and the transition had no impact on end users.

Lower latency, lower costs and reliable uptime

By running reader nodes on OVHcloud Bare Metal, StreamingFast improved perceived latency by 2x to 3x on some networks. It also saw much faster startup and catch-up times on demanding blockchains such as Solana.

At the same time, the company reduced infrastructure spend by more than $20,000 per month.

For a business built on speed, completeness and uptime, those gains matter at every level. Better latency improves the end-user experience. Faster backfills strengthen product performance. Lower costs create more room to scale.

OVHcloud Bare Metal servers drastically lowered our end-users’ blockchain head latency.

Matthieu Vachon, CTO at StreamingFast

Reliability has become a clear advantage for StreamingFast. Since moving workloads to OVHcloud, the company has benefited from multi-month uptime with very few restarts, while keeping day-to-day operations simple for the internal DevOps team. This stability matters as StreamingFast expands across the Web3 ecosystem and adds support for more blockchains. With OVHcloud, the company has a strong foundation to scale further, combining high-performance infrastructure, operational reliability and predictable costs.