Ankr’s IP Address Policy & Your Privacy: What You Should Know

TL;DR

1. Ankr doesn't store PII or have a method to correlate wallet transactions to IP addresses.

2. Ankr does not use our RPC to front-run transactions (MEV exploitation on your transactions).

3. We continue to work on our decentralization roadmap while prioritizing quality of service.

Ankr’s goal is to provide the best possible blockchain connection experience for our builders and users. This includes an emphasis on best-in-class delivery as well as protecting user privacy. To this end, we want to clarify our IP collection policy.

When Does Ankr Use IP Addresses?

For service delivery purposes, we temporarily record IP addresses to set usage limits and monitor for denial of service attacks against our infrastructure. Though we do look at high-level data around the success rate of transactions made over the blockchain RPC, we do not correlate wallet transactions made over the infrastructure to the IP address making the RPC request. Thus, we do not store, exploit, or share any information regarding Personal Identifiable Information (PII), including wallet addresses. In accordance with our privacy philosophy (as well as the terms of the Cloudflare service we use), we store IP address data only as long as it is useful to fulfill its purpose in ensuring users receive the highest quality service possible. Additionally, unlike other RPC providers in the market, we feel it’s important to clarify that we do not perform any kind of MEV from our RPC service in any way.

By design, the Cloudflare service Ankr uses is based on the same approach to data privacy:

“Cloudflare has no interest in what any specific individuals are doing on the Internet and has no means of connecting any one IP address to any one natural person.”

Ankr collects IP addresses in different ways based on the user’s plan:

Public (Free) Plans:

• Rate limiting: Ankr must track the use of RPC services via IP address to implement request limits for our different service levels.
• GeoIP steering: To correctly serve traffic and route it to the closest data centers, it is necessary to obtain IP addresses for delivering low-latency responses.
• Service improvements: IP address data contributes to the collective internal insights Ankr gathers to improve services for customers in terms of speed and reliability.

Premium & Enterprise Plans:

• Premium telemetry functionality: Our paid users want telemetry data and the ability to monitor performance and resolve issues that arise.
• Rate limiting: Ankr must track the use of RPC services via IP address to ensure we can deliver approximately 1,500 requests per second limit for Premium plans.
• GeoIP steering: To correctly serve traffic and route it to the closest data centers, it is necessary to obtain IP addresses for delivering low-latency returns.
• IP Whitelisting: Ankr has a feature to limit the access of the RPC requests with a user-defined IP whitelist.

This is the minimal amount of information that is required to act as a high-quality RPC provider, but we take all possible measures to preserve user confidentiality.

We Always Listen To User Concerns

We are continuously reviewing our policies as we listen to user feedback and adjust policies as technology changes. This is an evolving process, and our current policy terms and conditions will be updated soon. In addition, note that we do comply with court orders as is our legal responsibility as a company established in the United States. We seek continuous improvement, and we constantly review our policies to protect user privacy while retaining the functionality that is required to run a public RPC network. As we continue to implement our roadmap to increasingly decentralize services, Ankr will keep the guiding principles of blockchain at the forefront of our products – and the privacy of our community will always be an integral part of this.

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