net_listening

BNB Smart Chain validators gossip blocks across a peer-to-peer mesh, secured by PoSA and paid for in BNB. net_listening asks one narrow question of the node behind your request. Is its networking layer open and accepting incoming peer connections right now? Aim the request at https://bsc.therpc.io/YOUR_API_KEY on chain ID 56 and the node answers with a plain boolean. You get true when its P2P port is actively listening for peers and false when networking is shut down or disabled. This is the lightest liveness signal there is. It says nothing about sync state or how many peers are actually attached.

Use cases

Use it as a featherweight liveness probe inside cron-driven monitoring scripts that ping each BSC node on a schedule.
Confirm a node's networking is up before kicking off automated batch operations that would otherwise fail mid-run.

Parameters

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

Response

Type	Description
boolean	`true` if the client is listening for P2P connections, `false` otherwise.

Example request

1curl https://bsc.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 BNB Smart Chain playground.

Errors & troubleshooting

Common pitfalls

A true reply only confirms the port is open, not that any peers are attached; pair it with net_peerCount to verify the node has real connectivity into the BSC network.
Managed RPC layers frequently answer true unconditionally from their gateway, so the value may not reflect the listening state of any single backend node.

Supported networks

Mainnet — Chain ID: 56
Testnet — Chain ID: 97