getAccountInfo

On Solana, every piece of state — wallets, SPL Token balances, and the data accounts owned by programs — lives in an account addressed by a base-58 public key. getAccountInfo reads one such account and returns its full on-chain state and metadata: the raw data, the owning program in owner, the SOL balance in lamports (1 SOL = 1,000,000,000 lamports), the executable flag, rentEpoch, and space. If the address has never been funded or created, the call returns a null value rather than an error. Send the request as a JSON-RPC 2.0 POST with positional params to https://solana.therpc.io/YOUR_API_KEY, choosing base64 for raw bytes or jsonParsed when a program (such as SPL Token) has a known layout you want decoded.

Use cases

• Read an account's owner and lamports before interacting with it, so you know which program controls it and whether it is funded.
• Fetch a program-owned data account — for example an SPL Token or Token-2022 account — and decode it directly with encoding: "jsonParsed".
• Check whether an account already exists (a null value) before you derive and initialize its PDA, avoiding a "create" instruction on something that is live.
• Pull only the bytes you need from a large account with dataSlice: { offset, length } to save bandwidth when you read just a header or a single field.

Parameters

Response

Example request

1curl https://solana.therpc.io/YOUR_API_KEY \
2  -X POST \
3  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
4  -d '{
5  "jsonrpc": "2.0",
6  "id": 1,
7  "method": "getAccountInfo",
8  "params": [
9    "9WzDXwBbmkg8ZTbNMqUxvQRAyrZzDsGYdLVL9zYtAWWM",
10    {
11      "encoding": "base64"
12    }
13  ]
14}'

Errors & troubleshooting

Common pitfalls

• base58 encoding fails for account data larger than 128 bytes. For anything bigger, request base64 (or base64+zstd to compress large payloads).
• A non-existent or never-funded account returns value: null, not an error — branch on null before reading lamports, owner, or data.
• dataSlice is not valid together with jsonParsed encoding; use dataSlice only with the raw base64/base58 encodings.

Supported networks

• Mainnet
• Devnet

See also

• getMultipleAccounts
• getProgramAccounts
• getBalance