eth_getBlockByNumber

eth_getBlockByNumber fetches a block on Ethereum mainnet by its height or by a named tag. Pass a hex height for an exact block, or a tag — latest for the current head, safe for a justified block, finalized for one that's economically irreversible, earliest for genesis. The block object is identical to what eth_getBlockByHash returns: header roots, timestamp, EIP-1559 baseFeePerGas, gas metrics, post-Merge withdrawals, and either full transactions or their hashes. With one block per 12-second slot, walking heights sequentially walks the chain in time. Send requests to https://ethereum.therpc.io/YOUR_API_KEY (chain ID 1, native coin ETH).

Use cases

• Indexing. Step heights one at a time — roughly one new block every 12 seconds — to ingest the chain in order without gaps.
• Live dashboards. Poll latest to surface the freshest block's timestamp, gas usage, and transaction count on a monitor.
• Reorg-safe anchoring. Request the finalized block so any query built on top of it can't be invalidated by a head reorg.
• Receipt prep. Pull a block with includeTransactions=false to get just the hashes, then fetch all receipts in one shot with eth_getBlockReceipts.

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_getBlockByNumber",
7    "params": [
8        "latest",
9        false
10      ],
11    "id": 1
12  }'

Try it live in the Ethereum playground.

Errors & troubleshooting

Common pitfalls

• The second argument must be a JSON boolean, not the string "true". Quoted, it gets misread and you may silently receive hashes when you wanted full transactions.
• Don't loop eth_getTransactionReceipt over a block's transactions when you need them all — one eth_getBlockReceipts call returns every receipt and saves you dozens of round-trips.
• A busy mainnet block with includeTransactions=true can run 1–2 MB. If you're only after metadata, request hashes only and hydrate transactions selectively.

Supported networks

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

See also

• eth_getBlockByHash
• eth_getBlockReceipts
• eth_blockNumber
• eth_getBlockTransactionCountByNumber

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_getBlockByNumber","params":["latest",false]}'