Ethereum method

eth_syncing

Reports whether the node is still catching up with the chain.

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_syncing on Ethereum
Provider	Status	Success	Median	Worst p95	Incidents	Samples
Tenderly	Supported	100.0%	13 ms	48 ms	none	49
Cloudflare	Supported	100.0%	21 ms	48 ms	none	47
PublicNode	Supported	100.0%	28 ms	323 ms	none	48
dRPC	Supported	100.0%	37 ms	96 ms	none	47
MEV Blocker	Supported	100.0%	50 ms	119 ms	none	48
NodeReal	Supported	100.0%	62 ms	96 ms	none	46
Merkle	Rate limited	4.2%	121 ms	121 ms	none	24
1RPConerpc	Rate limited	0.0%	—	—	none	23
Blast API	Not measured	0.0%	—	—	none	46

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. 2 providers are not plotted: they returned no successful response in this window, so they have no latency.

What it does

Returns `false` when the node is synced, and an object with `startingBlock`, `currentBlock` and `highestBlock` when it is not.

A syncing node answers requests normally and quickly while serving state that is hours or days old. Nothing else in the JSON-RPC surface tells you this.

Returns

Object | false.

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_syncing","params":[],"id":1}'

As JSON-RPC

{
  "jsonrpc": "2.0",
  "method": "eth_syncing",
  "params": [],
  "id": 1
}

Response

{
  "id": 1,
  "jsonrpc": "2.0",
  "result": false
}

Things that bite

Behind a load balancer this reflects whichever node answered, so false is not a promise about the fleet.
Clients may add fields beyond the documented three. Parsers that reject unknown keys break on some providers.

Why it is measured

It is the only self-reported health signal in the standard API, and it is worth recording precisely because a syncing node looks healthy on every other metric.

Called every 300 seconds per endpoint, with jitter so the fleet does not hit a provider in lockstep.

1h window · generated 2026-10-08 18:12:50 UTC · 9 providers