BNB Smart Chain method

eth_blockNumber

Returns the number of the most recent block the node has, as a hex quantity.

cheapCheap for a provider to serve — no state is read, or one key is.Primary specification

How each provider handles it

Provider support for eth_blockNumber on BSC
Provider	Status	Success	Median	Worst p95	Incidents	Samples
PublicNode	Supported	100.0%	28 ms	1529 ms	none	474
Blast API	Supported	99.8%	109 ms	172 ms	none	468
BNB Chain	Supported	100.0%	17 ms	105 ms	none	943
NodeReal	Supported	100.0%	18 ms	87 ms	none	455
1RPConerpc	Rate limited	0.0%	—	—	none	24

Success excludes calls the provider does not implement — an optional method a provider declines to offer is a capability fact, not a failure, and is never scored as one.

Over time

Median latency per minute. Gaps are periods with no measurement, drawn as gaps rather than joined across — a line through missing data invents a measurement that was never taken.

Logarithmic scale — each gridline is ten times the one below it. Click a provider in the legend to hide it. 1 provider is not plotted: they returned no successful response in this window, so they have no latency.

What it does

This is the node's own view of the chain head. It is not a claim about the network — a node that has fallen behind reports its own stale head perfectly happily, and with no error.

That is exactly what makes it useful for measurement. Comparing one node's head against nothing tells you very little; comparing it against every other node at the same instant tells you which providers are behind.

Returns

QUANTITY — the current block number in hex.

Try it

Runnable as written, against a keyless public endpoint. Nothing here needs an API key.

Request

curl -s https://ethereum-rpc.publicnode.com \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","method":"eth_blockNumber","params":[],"id":83}'

As JSON-RPC

{
  "jsonrpc": "2.0",
  "method": "eth_blockNumber",
  "params": [],
  "id": 83
}

Response

{
  "id": 83,
  "jsonrpc": "2.0",
  "result": "0x4b7"
}

Things that bite

Behind a load balancer, consecutive calls can go backwards: two nodes at different heights answering in turn. A head that decreases is a real finding about the provider's fleet, not a bug in the caller.

Why it is measured

It is the primary freshness signal. Each observed head is compared against the highest plausible head across the whole cohort at that instant, time-aligned by the chain's block rate — never against a single provider treated as truth.

Called every 30 seconds per endpoint, with jitter so the fleet does not hit a provider in lockstep.

1h window · generated 2026-10-08 18:33:22 UTC · 5 providers