eth_getProof

eth_getProof (EIP-1186) returns an account's core fields — balance in ETH wei, nonce, codeHash, storageHash — together with the Merkle-Patricia trie proof that ties them to the block's stateRoot, plus proofs for any storage slots you ask about. Ethereum stores all account and storage state in Merkle-Patricia tries, and this method gives you the chain of RLP-encoded trie nodes from the leaf up to the root. With that, anyone holding only a trusted block header can verify a balance or slot value without trusting the node that served it. Call it on mainnet (chain ID 1) at https://ethereum.therpc.io/YOUR_API_KEY. The accountProof and storageProof arrays it returns are the cryptographic witness; the bare values without the proof are what eth_getBalance or eth_getStorageAt give you.

Use cases

• Verify a balance or storage value trustlessly in a light client or a cross-chain bridge contract — the proof checks against the stateRoot in the header, so a lying node can't forge it.
• Build the state witnesses that L2 fraud proofs and validity proofs lean on when settling a dispute back on Ethereum L1.
• Feed state into stateless-client and verkle-trie experiments, where execution carries its own proof of the state it touched rather than a full copy of the trie.
• Audit a token's supply or a treasury balance by proving the exact storage slot value at a known block hash, so the figure is independently checkable rather than taken on trust.

Parameters

Response

Example request

1curl https://ethereum.therpc.io/YOUR_API_KEY \
2  -X POST \
3  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
4  -d '{
5    "jsonrpc": "2.0",
6    "method": "eth_getProof",
7    "params": [
8        "0xd8dA6BF26964aF9D7eEd9e03E53415D37aA96045",
9        [],
10        "latest"
11      ],
12    "id": 1
13  }'

Try it live in the Ethereum playground.

Errors & troubleshooting

Common pitfalls

• The proof is only useful if you actually verify it, which means implementing Merkle-Patricia trie traversal and Keccak-256 hashing of each node. If you don't need trustless verification, eth_getStorageAt and eth_getBalance give you the raw values with none of that machinery.
• State proofs need the state to still exist. At an old height a pruned full node has discarded it and returns a -32000 missing-trie-node error; you need an archive node to prove historical state.
• A proof proves nothing on its own — you must hash the accountProof chain up to a root and check it equals the stateRoot from a block header you already trust. Skip that step and you've verified nothing.

Supported networks

• Mainnet — Chain ID: 1
• Sepolia — Chain ID: 11155111

See also

• eth_getStorageAt
• eth_getCode
• eth_getBalance

1curl https://ethereum.therpc.io/YOUR_API_KEY \
2  -X POST \
3  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
4  -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"eth_getProof","params":["0xd8dA6BF26964aF9D7eEd9e03E53415D37aA96045",[],""]}'