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

#	Name	Type	Required	Description
1	`address`	string (hex)	Yes	The contract whose storage to read.
2	`storageSlot`	string (hex)	Yes	Storage position to read. For mappings, this is the keccak256-derived slot.
3	`blockTag`	string	No	Block at which to read.Default: `latest`

Response

Type	Description
string (hex)	32-byte hex-encoded value stored at the slot, left-padded with zeros.

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

Code	Message	Cause
`-32602`	`Invalid params`	Address or slot index is malformed.
`-32000`	`Missing trie node`	Historical block pruned on a non-archive node.

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