2026 was the year the free blockchain API got harder to find.
Blockscout moved all API traffic to a keyed Pro API on July 1. Dune’s Sim APIs shut down on August 1. Blocknative switched its APIs off in June. GetBlock retired flat per-request billing for compute units, so heavy calls now cost more than simple ones. Pyth’s Hermes endpoint, which thousands of teams called without credentials, now wants an API key.
None of that means free access died. It means the free tiers that survived are worth knowing precisely, because the gap between a generous one and a decorative one is now the difference between shipping and re-architecting in month three.
This list ranks 12 providers on a single question: how much do you get from one key before you have to add a second vendor?
How we ranked them
Breadth of a single key, first. A provider that returns prices, balances, transaction history and protocol positions from one credential saves more engineering time than one that returns any single category faster.
Then free tier honesty. A free plan that stops at 100 credits is a demo. One that covers a working prototype for months is a product decision.
Then published pricing. Any provider whose entry price is a sales call ranked below one you can read off a page. That rule removed several well-known names from this list.
Everything below was checked against each provider’s own pricing and docs pages in September 2026. Where a company’s own pages disagreed with each other, and two of them did, we say so in the entry.
The 12 at a glance
1. CoinStats API
CoinStats blockchain API is the broadest single key on this list. It returns market data for 100,000+ coins, wallet balances across 120+ blockchains, DeFi positions across 10,000+ protocols, portfolio analytics, and smart contract token risk scoring on EVM chains. The same infrastructure serves over a million users of the CoinStats app, so it is production-tested rather than a data product built for resale.
The practical version of that: a portfolio app usually needs a price API, a wallet API, a DeFi position decoder and something for analytics. That is four vendors, four billing relationships and four schemas to reconcile. This is one.
Free access is 20,000 credits a month at 2 requests per second, with no feature gates between tiers. Credits are weighted rather than flat. A market data call costs 1 to 2, a wallet balance call costs 40 to 50, and a Bitcoin xpub lookup costs 4,000. Paid plans run $49, $199 and $999 a month.
It also ships an MCP server with 20+ tools, which means Claude, Cursor or an in-house agent can query wallets and prices directly without you writing a wrapper. There is x402 support too, for agents paying per request in USDC on Base.
Worth knowing before you commit: CoinStats API is not a node provider. No RPC access, no transaction submission, no streaming. There is no WebSocket, so live prices come from polling. DeFi positions and token risk endpoints need a paid plan, and token risk covers EVM chains only.
Best for portfolio trackers, tax tools, wallet apps and AI agents that need more than prices.
2. Codex
Codex indexes tokens the moment they hit the chain, which is the part most aggregators do slowly. Live prices, OHLCV, holder analytics and wallet balances come back through one GraphQL schema across 80+ networks. It also covers prediction markets, including Polymarket and Kalshi, through the same endpoint.
Speed is the pitch. Data freshness runs at about a second, with WebSocket subscriptions and webhooks for live price and trade feeds. Codex says TradingView uses it as its sole source of onchain data, and that it serves all EVM data in the Pump.fun app.
Free access is 10,000 requests a month after a one-time $1 verification charge. Growth starts at $350 a month for a million requests.
One caution on coverage numbers. Codex publishes different token counts on different pages, ranging from tens of millions to ninety million depending on where you look, so treat the headline figure as approximate.
Not a wallet stack. Codex does not decode LP or staking positions, does not read centralized exchange balances, and does not cover non smart contract chains like Bitcoin.
Best for trading interfaces, token discovery and anything where a second of staleness costs money.
3. GetBlock
GetBlock is the node layer. It lists 130+ chains in its catalogue, with 99 available on a shared endpoint and 133 available as dedicated nodes, which is the widest chain list here by some distance.
Shared node access is metered in compute units at $0.40 per million. Dedicated nodes start at $49 a month and spin up in under five minutes. Teams spending over $1,000 a month move to custom terms. The company holds SOC 2 Type II attestation, which matters if your compliance team asks.
A free endpoint is available, though the allowance is set through a slider rather than published as a flat number, so check it at signup. Their homepage says 100+ protocols while the node catalogue says 130+, so the catalogue is the page to trust.
This is direct access, not interpretation. You decode the responses yourself. There is a documentation MCP server, though the AI tooling here is thinner than at the data layer.
Best for teams that need direct chain access, archive data, or a chain nobody else supports.
4. GoldRush by Covalent
GoldRush answers the question that eats the most engineering time in wallet products: what has this address actually done. It returns decoded transaction history, token balances, historical portfolio value and OHLCV across 100+ chains, including Solana and Bitcoin alongside EVM networks.
Decoded is the operative word. Raw logs tell you a contract emitted an event. GoldRush tells you it was a swap, for how much, against what.
Pricing is credit-based, starting at $50 a month, with flexible credits at $0.001 each. There is a 14-day trial carrying 25,000 credits rather than a permanent free tier, which is the main thing to weigh.
It ships a first-party MCP server and supports x402 pay-per-request.
Best for wallets, tax software and anything that renders a transaction feed a human has to read.
5. Pinax
Pinax operates the streaming layer that most teams do not realise they need until polling stops scaling. Firehose gives block-level data across 46 chains. Substreams lets you write parallelised transforms over it. WebSockets push blocks, transactions, logs and token transfers as they happen, multiplexed across 30+ chains on a single connection.
It also hosts a managed Token API, which is worth knowing if a hosted indexing service you relied on has moved.
There is a free plan, then $25 and $200 a month tiers, with per-request pricing from $0.15 per 10,000. MCP servers are available.
Free plan worker capacity depends on availability, so it is better suited to evaluation than to a launch.
Best for teams building their own data infrastructure who want the firehose rather than a finished endpoint.
6. Blockscout
Blockscout is the open-source explorer that quietly became a serious API. Since July 2026 everything runs through the Pro API, one endpoint covering 120+ chains, switched by a chain_id parameter.
The free tier is the most generous here. 100,000 credits a day at 5 requests per second, and since most endpoints cost 20 credits, that is roughly 5,000 calls a day, every day, on every supported chain. Builder is $49 a month for 100 million credits at 15 RPS. Pro is $199 for 500 million at 30 RPS.
You also get the option nobody else offers: self-host it. The explorer is open source, so if you would rather run your own instance for a specific chain, you can.
Data is explorer-shaped. Token metadata, proxy resolution, internal transactions and contract context, rather than portfolio analytics or price history.
Best for block explorers, contract tooling and any team that wants a free tier it will not outgrow next quarter.
7. Goldsky
Goldsky is for teams whose data question is specific enough that no off-the-shelf endpoint answers it. You define a subgraph, they host and scale it. Mirror pipelines stream indexed data straight into your own warehouse.
You get $100 in credits to start with no card. Hosted subgraphs run from about $0.05 an hour, roughly $37 a month, with a free Starter tier. Mirror bills separately at $0.16 an hour of compute plus $1.50 per gigabyte stored. Request pricing gives you the first 100,000 free, then $4 per 100,000.
Goldsky supports 150+ chains, with an RPC proxy layer in front.
This is infrastructure, not an endpoint. Budget engineering time for schema design.
Best for protocols indexing their own contracts and teams that already know exactly which events matter.
Free tiers are quoted in credits, requests, compute units and credits per day. Among the four that publish a comparable number, the largest is sixty times the smallest.
8. DefiLlama
DefiLlama is the number everyone else quotes. TVL, fees, revenue, stablecoin supply, DEX volume and yields across 450+ chains and 8,000+ protocols, computed from open-source adapters anyone can audit.
The public REST API needs no authentication at all. No key, no signup, 31+ endpoints, free. For a large share of use cases that is the whole integration.
The paid API subscription is $300 a month and adds 38 endpoints covering token unlocks, bridge flows and digital asset treasuries, plus higher rate limits. Note that API access is billed separately from the Pro dashboard subscription, which trips people up.
Protocol-level economics only. No wallet balances, no per-address history.
Best for dashboards, research tools and anything that needs a TVL figure a reader will recognise.
9. Pyth Network
Pyth is an oracle rather than a query API, which makes it the odd entry here and a necessary one. Over 120 financial institutions publish prices directly, and those prices land onchain where contracts can read them.
If your product settles anything based on a price, a REST call from a server is not good enough. You need the number onchain, signed, with a publisher set behind it. That is what this does.
The model changed in 2026. Hermes, long callable without credentials, now requires an API key, and the price feeds product now lists Free, $500 and $2,500 plans. The page uses trial wording around the free option, so confirm whether it is permanent before you build on it.
Not a data warehouse. Pyth gives you prices, not balances, history or protocol state.
Best for DeFi protocols, perps venues and anything where a wrong price is an exploit.
10. Footprint Analytics
Footprint covers the ground between raw endpoints and a full analytics build. Prebuilt datasets across 30+ chains, reachable without writing SQL, alongside an MCP marketplace it calls OmniMCP for agent-driven queries.
That last part is the interesting bit in 2026. If you are building something where an agent explores data rather than a developer querying a known schema, an MCP-first product removes a translation layer.
There is a free plan. Paid tiers are usage-based and worth pricing against your own volume before committing.
Coverage is narrower than the multi-chain providers above, and prebuilt means less control when your question is unusual.
Best for analysts, growth teams and agent workflows that need answers rather than infrastructure.
11. Dune
Dune is the SQL layer over onchain data, backed by the largest community of public queries in crypto. If a question has been asked before, someone has probably already written the query and published the dashboard.
The API is included on every plan, including the free one, which is more generous than it sounds. You can trigger query executions and export results without paying, subject to credits and spend limits. There is an MCP server and a CLI too.
Paid tiers add credits, seats, private queries and a faster engine. Check current pricing directly, since Dune has revised its tiers more than once this year.
The catch is skill, not cost. Without SQL, Dune is a place to read other people’s dashboards.
Best for analysts, researchers and teams whose questions change weekly.
12. Birdeye
Birdeye is the one to reach for when Solana is the point rather than one chain among many. Real-time prices, OHLCV, DEX trades, new pair discovery, token security signals and wallet data, with WebSocket streaming across a growing multi-chain footprint.
New token discovery is where it earns its place. Assets that appear on a DEX minutes ago show up here well before broader aggregators list them.
Billing is in compute units, with a free Standard tier and paid rates scaling from $15 down to $6.90 per million CUs. There is an MCP server.
Coverage skews Solana-first, so it complements a multi-chain provider rather than replacing one.
Best for Solana trading apps, memecoin tooling and DEX analytics.
Which one should you actually pick
Most production stacks end up with two. One broad provider covering the data your interface renders, and one specialist for whatever your product is actually about.
Building a portfolio tracker, wallet or tax tool, start with CoinStats API and add a node provider only if you need to write transactions. Building a trading interface, pair Codex or Birdeye for real-time token data with something that handles balances. Building a protocol dashboard, DefiLlama free plus Dune covers most of it for close to nothing.
If you need direct chain access, GetBlock. If you need history a human can read, GoldRush. If you are indexing your own contracts, Goldsky or Pinax. If a smart contract consumes the price, Pyth.
Crypto Daily covered the same territory from the DeFi side in Building DeFi in 2026: Top 7 API Providers Behind Modern On-Chain Products, which is worth reading alongside this if protocol integrations are your use case.
One last thing worth doing before you sign anything. Take your actual monthly call volume, split it by endpoint type, and price it on each candidate’s real billing unit. Weighted credit systems and compute units make headline prices close to meaningless. A provider that looks twice as expensive per month can be cheaper for your specific mix, and the reverse happens just as often. CoinStats runs that same comparison on a shorter roster in its best crypto data APIs guide.
Check pricing pages directly before you commit. Four providers on this list changed their terms during 2026: Blockscout, GetBlock, Pyth and Dune.
Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.
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