net_listening

net_listening returns a boolean telling you whether a Base node is actively listening for incoming peer-to-peer connections. Base is Coinbase's OP Stack optimistic rollup that settles to Ethereum and charges gas in ETH; like any node on that network, a Base client must stay connected to peers to receive blocks from the sequencer and stay current. A true result means the P2P listener is open, which is the most basic liveness signal you can read. Send the call to https://base.therpc.io/YOUR_API_KEY on chain ID 8453 (hex 0x2105).

Use cases

• Use it as a lightweight liveness probe in monitoring scripts that watch your Base RPC endpoint, alerting if the node ever stops listening for peers.
• Verify a Base node's network connectivity before kicking off automated operations — for example, confirm net_listening is true before a job starts broadcasting ETH transactions.

Parameters

This method takes no parameters. Pass an empty array [].

Response

Example request

1curl https://base.therpc.io/YOUR_API_KEY \
2  -X POST \
3  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
4  -d '{
5    "jsonrpc": "2.0",
6    "method": "net_listening",
7    "params": [],
8    "id": 1
9  }'

Try it live in the Base playground.

Errors & troubleshooting

Common pitfalls

• A true result only means the Base node has its listener open, not that it actually has peers connected. Pair it with net_peerCount to confirm the node is really exchanging data with the network.
• Managed RPC endpoints like https://base.therpc.io/YOUR_API_KEY sit behind a load balancer and may always return true regardless of any single backend node's state, so treat this as a coarse signal rather than ground truth about a specific machine.

Supported networks

• Mainnet — Chain ID: 8453
• Sepolia — Chain ID: 84532

See also

• net_peerCount
• net_version

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