Research findings:
- Alchemy Growth DOES support WebSocket subscriptions (up to 2,000 connections)
- All standard Solana RPC methods supported
- No documented Drift-Alchemy incompatibilities
- Rate limits enforced via CUPS (Compute Units Per Second)
Hypothesis for our failures:
- accountSubscribe 'errors' might be 429 rate limits, not 'method not found'
- Drift SDK may not handle Alchemy's rate limit pattern during init
- First trade works (subscriptions established) → subsequent fail (bad state)
Pragmatic decision:
- Helius works reliably NOW for production trading
- Theoretical investigation can wait until needed
- Future optimization possible with WebSocket-specific retry logic
This note preserves the research for future reference without changing
the current production recommendation (Helius only).
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