Comparison
SolanaVault vs Old Faithful: live RPC versus cold archival
Old Faithful proved that Solana history can live on a decentralized substrate. SolanaVault picks up where it leaves off — making that data fast enough for live RPC.
What Old Faithful gets right
Old Faithful is the most important decentralized Solana data project of its era. It puts the entire Solana ledger on IPFS-addressable Filecoin storage and proves the architectural point that long-term Solana history does not need centralized custodianship. That contribution is real and we cite it constantly.
If your goal is cold archival — a verifiable copy of a slot that you might need once a quarter for a compliance review — Old Faithful is excellent. The retrieval economics of Filecoin make it the right substrate for that use case.
What it is not built for
Old Faithful is not optimized for live RPC. Filecoin retrieval times are measured in seconds to minutes, not microseconds. The data is referenced by content address, not by Solana RPC method name. There is no equivalent to getSignaturesForAddress against a Filecoin sector.
That is fine. It is not what the project is for. But it is also why teams running indexers and analytics pipelines cannot just use Old Faithful as a drop-in.
How SolanaVault fits in
SolanaVault is the live RPC layer that Old Faithful complements. We hold compressed blocks in a P2P network with microsecond decompression and a JSON-RPC interface that matches mainnet-beta one-to-one. Where Old Faithful answers “is this slot preserved?”, SolanaVault answers “give me slot 245000000 and its 1200 transactions, right now, fast.”
We have prototyped a Filecoin bridge that lets Vault storage nodes settle long-tail slots to Old Faithful and reclaim local capacity for hot data. That bridge is roadmap, not shipped — but it points at the right architecture: SolanaVault for live and warm data, Old Faithful for cold archival, both decentralized, both verifiable.
A direct comparison
| Dimension | Old Faithful | SolanaVault |
|---|---|---|
| Substrate | Filecoin / IPFS | NNG P2P + RocksDB storage |
| Primary use case | Cold archival | Live RPC |
| Retrieval latency | Seconds to minutes | Microseconds to milliseconds |
| API surface | Content-addressed | Solana JSON-RPC |
| Storage cost model | Filecoin deals | Pay-per-use, operator revenue share |
| Verifiability | Cryptographic, on-chain | Byzantine consensus, reputation |
| Best at | Provable long-term retention | Active developer workloads |
The honest summary: these are complementary tools. Treat them that way.
What we recommend
- For analytics, indexing, explorers, and any active developer workload: SolanaVault.
- For audit retention, regulatory cold storage, and the “is this history still here in five years” question: Old Faithful.
- For a stack that wants both: a Vault gateway pointed at compressed local storage, with a periodic settlement to Filecoin for slots older than your retention threshold.
We are bullish on Old Faithful. We are also realistic about what it is — and what it is not. SolanaVault fills the gap.
Ready to benchmark?
Vault Cloud Builder gives you 5M queries free. Plug it into the same test harness you used for Old Faithful and let the numbers settle the argument.
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