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Solana method

getBlockHeight

Returns the current block height, which is lower than the slot.

cheapCheap for a provider to serve — no state is read, or one key is.Primary specification (opens in a new tab)

How each provider handles it

3 providers

Provider support for getBlockHeight on Solana
ProviderStatusSuccessMedian
TatumDegraded91.8%27 ms
Solana FoundationSupported99.9%14 ms
PublicNodeSupported100.0%24 ms

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 hour. 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.

When it degraded

A degradation is a bucket where a provider fell away from ITS OWN median for this method over the window, not from the cohort's. A provider that is consistently slower than its peers is not degraded — it is slower, which the ranking already says. Buckets with fewer than 20 samples are skipped, because a claim about a provider cannot rest on a handful of calls, and adjacent bad buckets are merged so one outage reads as one incident.

Tatum

  • success fell to 86.2% from a typical 91.8%

    availability · 2026-10-08 02:00Z

  • success fell to 86.4% from a typical 91.8%

    availability · 2026-10-08 06:00Z

What it does

Block height counts blocks that were actually produced. Slot counts scheduled windows, including the ones a leader skipped, so height is always the smaller number and the gap between them grows over time.

Transaction expiry is expressed in block height, which is why `getLatestBlockhash` returns `lastValidBlockHeight` rather than a slot.

Parameters

configObjectoptional
commitment and minContextSlot.

Returns

u64 — the block height.

Try it

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

Request

curl -s https://api.mainnet-beta.solana.com \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"getBlockHeight"}'

As JSON-RPC

{
  "jsonrpc": "2.0",
  "id": 1,
  "method": "getBlockHeight"
}

Response

{
  "jsonrpc": "2.0",
  "result": 350412977,
  "id": 1
}

Things that bite

  • Comparing a block height against a slot is a category error, and the two are close enough in magnitude that the mistake is easy to miss.

Why it is measured

It advances more slowly and more evenly than the slot, which makes it a useful cross-check on a provider's head freshness.

Called every 60 seconds per endpoint, with jitter so the fleet does not hit a provider in lockstep.

24h window · generated 2026-10-08 19:33:50 UTC · 3 providers