SLV Enables Historical Data Access for Solana RPC. Eliminating High-Cost Archive Operations Through the Use of Old Faithful

ELSOUL LABO B.V. (Headquarters: Amsterdam, the Netherlands; CEO: Fumitake Kawasaki), together with Validators DAO, announces that SLV, the open-source Solana node operation platform, now supports access to historical data via Solana RPC.

With this update, Solana RPC instances operated using SLV can access blocks and transaction data going back in time, in addition to serving real-time use cases. This makes it possible to handle historical data access at a practical operational cost, eliminating the need for the large upfront investments and ongoing high-cost operations that were previously required.

While Solana is known for its high throughput, the total volume of data generated across the network is extremely large and continues to grow on a daily basis. For this reason, typical Solana RPC deployments prioritize performance and stability by retaining only a limited number of recent epochs.

As a result, standard RPC setups generally cannot provide access to blocks, transactions, or account states beyond a certain point in the past, and missing historical data has effectively been the norm. While this is not an issue for short-term application behavior or real-time processing, it has been a clear limitation for use cases such as long-term on-chain analysis, behavioral verification, audits, and research.

To overcome these limitations, operators have traditionally needed to build and maintain dedicated archive nodes. Handling the full historical dataset of Solana requires continuously maintaining extremely large storage capacity, along with specialized configurations to support data search and delivery.

In real-world deployments, architectures based on managed data stores such as Google Bigtable have often been used in practice. These approaches involve significant data migration costs during initial setup, followed by high ongoing operating expenses and continuous maintenance overhead.

Such archive configurations have only been feasible for a limited number of large-scale operators and have not been a realistic option for most RPC providers or organizations considering Solana for business or enterprise use.

Old Faithful is an open-source historical data distribution platform designed specifically for Solana to address these challenges. Its purpose is to archive Solana’s historical data and make it accessible for external consumption.

With this model, RPC operators no longer need to build and maintain massive archive storage systems or specialized database infrastructure on their own. It significantly reduces both the cost and operational burden associated with providing historical data access, while still enabling use cases that depend on past data.

SLV now supports historical data access by leveraging Old Faithful. Solana RPC instances launched and operated with SLV can access historical data through the same standard RPC interfaces used for existing workflows.

There is no need to separately construct dedicated archive nodes or Bigtable-based environments. Historical data can be handled as an extension of normal RPC operations, enabling use cases that depend on past data without requiring special infrastructure.

This update significantly lowers the initial investment and ongoing operational costs traditionally required to provide historical data access on Solana. For RPC providers, it enables the realistic consideration of new service designs and expanded offerings at manageable cost levels.

For business use cases and analytical workloads, the ability to perform verification and investigation based on historical data without large infrastructure investments contributes directly to faster decision-making and development cycles. Making historical data access practical beyond a small group of large operators represents an important step forward for the Solana ecosystem as a whole.

Support for historical data access in SLV-based Solana RPC deployments represents a shift away from the previously high-cost, specialized approaches required to handle past data. Accessing Solana’s historical data becomes a practical and realistic option at operationally sustainable cost levels.

This feature is available by upgrading to the latest version of SLV. The SLV user community can be joined via the Validators DAO official Discord.

Validators DAO Official Discord: https://discord.gg/C7ZQSrCkYR
SLV Official Website: https://slv.dev/