eth_getStorageAt

eth_getStorageAt reads one raw 32-byte word straight out of a contract's storage on Ethereum mainnet (chain ID 1, the EVM network whose gas is paid in ETH). Every contract keeps its state in a flat key-value store of 256-bit slots, and this method returns the value at the slot you name — no ABI, no getter function required. You give it a contract address, a slot index, and a block, and it answers with the 32-byte value left-padded with zeros. Pass a historical block and you read the slot as it stood at that height, not just at the head. The endpoint is https://ethereum.therpc.io/YOUR_API_KEY. It's the unfiltered counterpart to calling a public view function: closer to the metal, and it works even when no getter is exposed.

Use cases

• Read a proxy's implementation address straight from the EIP-1967 logic slot (0x360894...bbc) when the contract exposes no getter for it.
• Inspect on-chain governance directly — proposal state, vote tallies, queued timelock actions in a MakerDAO/Sky or Compound-style system — by reading the slots those values live in.
• During an audit, confirm a deployed contract's storage layout matches the source by reading known slots and checking the values line up.
• Debug surprising state: when a view function returns something you didn't expect, drop to the raw slot to see what's actually written underneath.

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_getStorageAt",
7    "params": [
8        "0xd8dA6BF26964aF9D7eEd9e03E53415D37aA96045",
9        "0x0",
10        "latest"
11      ],
12    "id": 1
13  }'

Try it live in the Ethereum playground.

Errors & troubleshooting

Common pitfalls

• Storage layout isn't in the ABI. Solidity assigns slots by declaration order, so you have to know or derive which slot holds which variable, often by reading the compiler's storage-layout output.
• Small variables get packed together: several uint8/bool/address fields can share one 32-byte slot. Reading that slot gives you all of them at once, and you mask and shift to pull out the field you want.
• Mapping entries don't sit at the base slot. A value for key k lives at keccak256(abi.encode(k, baseSlot)), so you compute that hash first, then read it — the base slot itself is empty.

Supported networks

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

See also

• eth_getCode
• eth_getProof
• eth_call

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_getStorageAt","params":["0xd8dA6BF26964aF9D7eEd9e03E53415D37aA96045","",""]}'