DeFi distribution

Turtle: from five providers to one trusted data layer

Turtle ran its own indexing across a number of RPC providers for years. Now it runs on one source of truth: SQD Portal.

Published 2026-08-26

The SQD team was amazing, we never waited even a day for a reply.

Felix Frisk, Head of R&D, Turtle

Networks in active use: 39
Data requests served: 28.6M
Correct data: 100%

Turtle on SQD Portal, 30 days to 20 July 2026. All five figures

What is Turtle?

Turtle is onchain yield distribution infrastructure for internet capital markets: a liquidity distribution protocol that connects earn opportunities with the capital that funds them.

Indexing more than 2,500 opportunities across chains, Turtle reports over $6B in liquidity routed across 410,000+ participants as of August 2026.

Before: juggling untrustworthy providers

Turtle ran its indexing on RPC providers picked chain by chain for availability and price. The setup had problems.

Before five providers, chosen chain by chain

Inconsistent data between providers
Low uptime on some chains
Throughput bottlenecks, especially on traces
Incomplete or incorrect responses, no error attached

After one validated source

One source of truth for every chain
Six cryptographic checks on every block
Blocks, logs, traces and state diffs from one API
No verification step of Turtle’s own

The worst failures were silent. A request would come back incomplete, or with values that were wrong for what was asked, and nothing flagged it. Someone on the team had to spot it, work out which provider to doubt, and check against the others. Turtle was paying five providers and still doing its own verification.

A sixth provider wouldn’t have fixed the disagreement between the first five. Building the equivalent of SQD in-house came out at months of work per chain, before maintenance.

Consolidating five provider contracts into SQD Portal cut Turtle’s data infrastructure spend significantly. They also managed to remove the verification process entirely.

Rebuilding SQD internally was just too much work for the gain. It was a no-brainer to use a more reliable data source.

Felix Frisk Head of R&D, Turtle

The move: Portal from the ground up

Turtle was already revamping its entire indexing stack. Rather than migrate, the team built v3 on SQD Portal from the ground up: Portal as the primary adapter, with Turtle’s internal data shaped to match SQD’s format.

We built the newest version of our indexer on top of SQD from the get-go, making it the primary adapter.

Felix Frisk Head of R&D, Turtle

Today Turtle pulls blocks, logs, traces and state diffs across the EVM networks SQD offers and distills them into data you can analyse. That feed runs Turtle’s portfolio API and the Vault indexers.

Portal in production

and more

Source Blockchain networks Every EVM network Turtle covers, each with its own quirks, reorgs and release cadence.
Data layer SQD Portal Blocks, logs, traces and state diffs, validated with six cryptographic checks before they enter the pipeline.
Product Turtle services The portfolio API and the Vault indexers, built on Portal as the primary adapter.
End user Turtle customers Every balance checked and every vault position rendered traces back through Portal.

What changed

Speed

Adding a chain used to mean custom fixes and weeks of waiting, especially on L2s. Robinhood launched a chain and SQD enabled Turtle to support it straight away.

“We saved weeks to months implementing new and old chains that need custom fixes.”

Reliability

Every block is validated with six cryptographic checks before it enters the pipeline. Turtle stopped verifying its own data feed. The data also comes back fast enough to debug against, which shortened the path to production.

Consolidation

Turtle ran five providers. It now runs one source of truth: SQD Portal.

When the data is the product

For most companies, a data provider failing means an internal dashboard breaks. For Turtle, it means the product itself is wrong, and users see it in their balances.

The portfolio API and Vault indexers are powered by SQD data. Every balance a user checks, every vault position rendered, traces back to records served through Portal.

Basically all of our user data that's based on onchain analysis is built and distilled from the data we fetch from SQD, the portfolio API, the Vault indexers.

Felix Frisk Head of R&D, Turtle

Turtle made SQD the foundation its own customer promises and business rests on.

The numbers

30 days to 20 July 2026 Source: SQD monitoring

28.6M Data requests served

23.9TB Blockchain data returned

649M Records sent

39 Networks in active use

100% Correct data

Every network Turtle Club requires

30 days to August 25, 2026 Source: SQD monitoring

157 server errors in 38 million requests, every one a momentary availability error that the client retried and had served.

In their words

The SQD team was amazing, we never waited even a day for a reply. Errors were taken seriously and used to harden the whole system, helping us and other customers.
We would warmly recommend SQD to any of our current and future partners who need data from the blockchain, blocks, logs, traces or even state diffs. SQD's rapid improvement and expansion can be trusted to hold up to any scale.