BNB Smart Chain

BNB Smart Chain

net_peerCount

A healthy BNB Smart Chain node needs a solid set of peers to pick up freshly minted blocks promptly, since the PoSA chain produces one every few seconds and charges fees in BNB. net_peerCount reports how many peers the node currently holds open connections with, encoded as a hexadecimal integer such as "0x1a" for twenty-six peers. Issue the call to https://bsc.therpc.io/YOUR_API_KEY on chain ID 56 and decode the hex value to read the live total. A node well wired into the BSC gossip mesh keeps that number comfortably above zero so blocks propagate without delay.

Use cases

• Plot the decoded peer total over time in an infrastructure health dashboard to watch each BSC node's connectivity at a glance.
• Alert on a peer count that collapses toward zero, flagging an isolated node likely to lag behind on block propagation.

Parameters

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

Response

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_peerCount",
7    "params": [],
8    "id": 1
9  }'

Try it live in the BNB Smart Chain playground.

Errors & troubleshooting

Common pitfalls

• Through a managed gateway the figure reflects whichever backend node served the request, not a count meaningful to your particular session.
• A modest peer count on a professionally operated BSC node rarely signals trouble for your RPC traffic, since such nodes stay synced even with a lean peer set.

Supported networks

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

See also

• net_listening
• net_version

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