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Overview

The Radix Core API provides low-level access to Radix nodes for transaction submission, state queries, and network monitoring. It's primarily used by infrastructure operators, exchanges, and the Gateway API (which sits on top of it to provide a developer-friendly interface).

Most dApp developers use the Gateway API rather than the Core API directly. The Core API is essential for running the Radix Dashboard, block explorers, and exchange integrations.

What the Core API Exposes

Per the network APIs documentation, the Core API offers both low-level and high-level abstractions and covers four things: a long-term-support (LTS) sub-API aimed at financial integrators; a usefully abstracted but deliberately not comprehensive view of current ledger state, including account balances and other key native components; transaction preview, submission and status flow; and a committed transaction stream available at varying levels of abstraction. It is exposed by Radix nodes themselves and is predominantly intended as a private API – the public availability that exists comes from third-party RPC providers rather than from the protocol.

Core API, Gateway API and Engine State API

Radix exposes three read/write network APIs, and the distinction is one of abstraction rather than capability. The Core API is the node’s own interface, used by infrastructure operators, exchanges and the Gateway itself. The Gateway API sits above it, is served by the Network Gateway rather than by a node, and adds what a front end needs – filterable committed transaction history, queries against historic ledger state, and resubmission management on behalf of users. The Engine State API is the third and least-known: it exposes the complete current state of the ledger at the engine’s own abstraction, so it is comprehensive where the Core API is selective, with fewer and more general endpoints. It is served by nodes but is off by default and must be explicitly enabled in node configuration.

Access and Providers

The Radix Foundation does not run a public Core API, and the documented providers – a list the docs state is not vetted and implies no endorsement – have gone from two to one. NowNodes still serves the Core API at xrd.nownodes.io under paid plans with a month-long trial. Grove, founded by the team behind Pocket Network and long the only free option, is gone – and it went earlier than the wiki assumed. Grove announced on 10 November 2025 that it was stepping away from operating the Grove Portal, migrating its paid and public endpoint traffic to api.pocket.network over that month and handing its RPC and validator infrastructure to an entity called BuildInTheShade; the company itself has since published a farewell note and archived all 195 repositories in its GitHub organisation. The docs still publish its shared endpoint, radix-mainnet.rpc.grove.city, as free access up to 5 million requests per day. That host, portal.grove.city and buildintheshade.com are all absent from DNS, and Pocket Network's public endpoints do not carry Radix – so the documented free route to a Core API has led nowhere for months. The remaining option is to run a node, which is what the API is designed for and what gives control of the infrastructure, at the cost of tracking every protocol update.

HydrateLast updated 1d agov1.6.011 revisionsVerified Aug 17, 2026