What’s happening
The free public Tezos RPC service operated by ECAD Labs at *.tezos.ecadinfra.com will shut down on May 31, 2026. The Tezos Foundation has declined to renew funding for the service, and ECAD Labs cannot continue to operate it unfunded. If your wallet, dApp, indexer, or tooling uses these endpoints, you need to migrate before then.
Background
ECAD Labs launched the free public Tezos RPC service in 2018 and self-funded it for the first six years.
Since 2021, this service has operated independent of the major cloud providers on our own IPv4 space and co-located bare metal servers. When AWS and GCP go down, our nodes continue to serve the network.
Two years ago, after substantial cuts to Tezos Foundation funding for our work, we could no longer afford to continue providing the substantial resources required to opearate and monitor this service at scale.
In 2024 and 2025, the Tezos Foundation provided funding for ECAD Labs (through its sister company ECAD Infra) to continue providing a free public Tezos RPC service. The Tezos Foundation has denied our request to renew funding for 2026.
The service is still heavily used. In the last seven days alone, the public endpoints served roughly 54 million requests and 1.2 TB of data. That is a meaningful chunk of the live Tezos ecosystem: wallets, dApps, infrastructure operators, and end users. If you are one of the many projects currently relying on these endpoints, please treat this announcement as a hard prompt to migrate.
We are grateful for the Foundation’s contribution over the last two years, and we are proud of the six years before that when ECAD Labs carried the cost alone.
Why a commercial alternative isn’t viable
A natural question is whether we could simply convert this into a paid commercial service rather than retire it. We have looked at this carefully and concluded that we cannot.
Public RPC infrastructure of this kind carries high fixed costs (dedicated hardware, geographic distribution, 24/7 operations) and serves a long tail of developers, wallets, and end users who realistically cannot be metered or billed without breaking the applications it’s meant to support.
Given the limited size of the Tezos network, repeated cuts and withdrawal of Tezos Foundation funding for teams and projects that may have otherwise become customers, and the continuing precipitous decline in on-chain traffic, there is no viable business case for ECAD Labs to recoup its costs as a paid service. The addressable market is simply too small to cover the cost of running infrastructure of this quality.
AI tooling helps us build software faster, but it does not remove the operational cost of running production infrastructure, including monitoring, upgrades, security patching, and incident response.
This is precisely why sponsored, ecosystem-funded public infrastructure matters. Without it, services like this don’t get replaced by a commercial market; they just disappear.
Why we’re disappointed
Ideally, in a fully decentralized world, every participant should run their own node independent of the big cloud providers. That remains the gold standard, however, practically speaking, the vast majority of developers and projects get started and sustain cost effective operations by using free public RPC nodes: newcomers exploring the chain, individuals and small teams building with limited budgets, wallets and dApps that need a default endpoint to ship against. Without that on-ramp, the network is much harder to approach.
The quality of this on-ramp matters for both developers and users. That is why we run the free Tezos RPC service using bare-metal nodes in a certified colocation facility (ISO 27001 / SOC 2), multi-homed across tier-1 ISPs, with ECAD-owned IPv4 space and AS numbers for BGP routing. As public RPC capacity consolidates onto a small number of hyperscalers, the network’s liveness, censorship resistance, and resilience all become tied to those providers’ policies and outages. That is not the kind of decentralization Tezos should settle for.
Sadly, the Tezos Foundation’s decision not to renew funding for our free public Tezos RPC service (or any other ECAD Labs projects) appears to be part of a broader strategy to defund public goods (see Arthur Breitman’s statement about funding for public goods at the end of his 2026 TezDev presentation here: https://youtu.be/ZRCD1AHte5s?si=jDpi8rjNdNL4Lv\_h\&t=2036).
We believe this decision weakens the Tezos infrastructure commons and the entire developer community supporting the Tezos vision.
What’s affected
The following public endpoints (and all deprecated endpoints rerouted to these endpoints) will stop serving traffic on May 31, 2026:
- https://mainnet.tezos.ecadinfra.com
- https://ghostnet.tezos.ecadinfra.com
- https://shadownet.tezos.ecadinfra.com
Separately, our ECAD Infra baker has already been wound down. Anyone still staking with the ECAD Infra baker should switch to a different baker to keep earning rewards. You can browse alternatives at All Public Bakers in Tezos .
Shutdown plan
The endpoints will continue operating at full quality until May 31, 2026, and then stop. We’ll post reminders here and on our usual channels as the date approaches.
If you operate a wallet, dApp, indexer, or other production service, please treat this as your migration window now, not later.
What you should do
If your wallet, application, indexer, or tooling depends on any of the endpoints above, please plan a migration to an alternative provider well before May 31, 2026.
The Taquito project maintains a list of community RPC providers at https://taquito.io/docs/next/rpc_nodes/ which is a reasonable starting point, though the available options have thinned considerably in recent years.
If you maintain a public-facing project (wallet, dApp, SDK default, documentation) that hardcodes or recommends an ecadinfra.com Tezos endpoint, please update those defaults and notify your users.
Feedback and discussion
We’d welcome community input on this thread, both on migration logistics and on the broader question of how the Tezos ecosystem should fund independent public infrastructure going forward.
For technical questions or migration help, you can reach us at info@ecadlabs.com or via Contact Us | ECAD Infra . Live service status is published at https://status.ecadinfra.com/, and the full endpoint reference remains available at Tezos Infrastructure | ECAD Infra .
Thanks to everyone who has built on, relied on, and supported this service over the past eight years.
The ECAD Labs and Infra Teams
