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For a production NEAR application in 2026, do not make the old near.org or pagoda.co free RPC URLs your default. Those services were formally deprecated in 2025 and now have restrictive limits. Use a managed endpoint such as FastNear or QuickNode for the fastest reliable setup, or run your own node when you need infrastructure control, custom traffic policy, or archival data. The right choice depends on request volume, history requirements, latency, security responsibilities, and your team’s ability to operate blockchain infrastructure.
What happened to NEAR’s public RPC endpoints?
NEAR’s Infrastructure Committee began phasing out the free RPC services hosted under near.org and pagoda.co on June 1, 2025. The final phase began August 1, 2025. At that point, regular mainnet and testnet access was limited to 30 requests per minute and 75 requests per 10 minutes, with lower limits for archival traffic. The committee said the endpoints would remain only to avoid immediately breaking legacy applications and described them as “fully deprecated.”
The committee’s stated reason was that a fully subsidized service was hindering decentralization and making it harder for commercial RPC operators to develop. It recommended migrating to FastNear or Lava Network, selecting a paid provider tier, or operating a dedicated node.
A legacy URL may still answer a request today, but that is not the same as a production commitment. Limits, availability, and behavior can change without the guarantees expected from a paid service or an infrastructure team you control. Treat the old endpoints as temporary compatibility paths or low-volume experiments, not as dependable capacity for a new application.
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Regular versus archival NEAR RPC
NEAR JSON-RPC is the HTTP or WebSocket interface your application uses to read chain state, inspect blocks and chunks, submit transactions, query validators, and retrieve protocol information. The endpoint determines how much history is retained and how traffic is handled; your application still calls native NEAR methods.
Regular RPC
Regular endpoints are designed for current application activity: account and contract state, recent blocks, transaction submission, and routine status checks. A self-hosted non-archival node retains only the last five epochs according to NEAR’s node guidance. A managed provider’s “regular” product can have different retention, so check its documentation before assuming that old state is available.
Archival RPC
Use archival access when you must read old blocks, receipts, or historical contract state; rebuild an index from the beginning of a chain; investigate an old transaction; or answer time-based analytics queries. Archival service normally costs more or has stricter limits because it requires substantially more storage and indexing. Do not route every request to an archive endpoint by default: send current traffic to regular RPC and reserve archival capacity for queries that need it.
FastNear: a NEAR-focused managed endpoint
FastNear publishes separate regular and archival URLs for each network:
| Network and retention | Endpoint | Typical use |
|---|---|---|
| Mainnet regular | https://rpc.mainnet.fastnear.com | Current production reads and transaction submission |
| Testnet regular | https://rpc.testnet.fastnear.com | Development and staging against testnet |
| Mainnet archival | https://archival-rpc.mainnet.fastnear.com | Older mainnet blocks, receipts, and state |
| Testnet archival | https://archival-rpc.testnet.fastnear.com | Historical testnet queries |
FastNear documents state queries, block and chunk inspection, transaction submission, validator information, and protocol introspection. Authentication uses an API key supplied either as an Authorization: Bearer ... header or an apiKey query parameter. Keep the key on a server or secret manager; never embed it in a browser bundle or publish it in a mobile application.
When FastNear is the sensible default
- You want a provider dedicated to NEAR rather than operating a node.
- You need clearly separated regular and archival URLs.
- You prefer documented API-key authentication and a short migration from an existing JSON-RPC client.
- Your team does not want to budget for synchronization, storage expansion, upgrades, and node incident response.
Before committing, confirm current quotas, overage behavior, archive retention, regions, and service-level terms for the plan you will purchase. Those commercial details can change.
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QuickNode: dashboard-led managed NEAR access
QuickNode’s current documentation describes managed NEAR endpoints for mainnet and testnet over HTTP and WSS. It lists archive availability and no pruning for both networks. The service uses native NEAR JSON-RPC methods, so an application using near-api-js can generally change the provider URL without rewriting its request logic.
Creating an endpoint
- Create an account in the provider dashboard.
- Choose NEAR as the chain and select mainnet or testnet.
- Create the endpoint, selecting an archive-capable option if your workload needs old state.
- Copy the generated HTTP or WSS URL into a server-side configuration variable.
- Send a
statusJSON-RPC request before connecting application code.
curl -s https://YOUR_ENDPOINT_URL
-H 'Content-Type: application/json'
--data '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":"health","method":"status","params":[]}'QuickNode is a practical fit if you value a dashboard workflow, a familiar multi-chain provider model, or provider claims about globally distributed routing. Confirm the exact plan’s request limits, archive policy, regions, pricing, and SLA before relying on those features.
Another hosted option: Ankr
Ankr’s NEAR page says that its public and freemium access has been deprecated. It states that NEAR access is available on a Premium plan with a paid API key and advertises higher throughput and rate limits, archive and trace methods, analytics, support, and enterprise options. These are vendor-plan statements rather than permanent network properties, so verify availability and terms at the time of purchase. Ankr can be useful when its plan and operational tooling match your needs, but compare its retention and limits directly with other providers instead of assuming that “Premium” means archival or unlimited.
Running a self-hosted NEAR node
Self-hosting replaces a provider contract with an infrastructure project. You control placement, routing, authentication, maintenance windows, and internal traffic policy, but you also own synchronization, storage, bandwidth, upgrades, backups, monitoring, and incident response.
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NEAR’s official Lake guide describes a self-hosted binary that operates as a regular peer-to-peer node and writes indexed block data to Amazon S3 or compatible object storage. Setup includes compiling the software, generating chain configuration and genesis files, synchronizing the node, and configuring the object-storage destination. For non-local networks, synchronization is required; the guide recommends Epoch Sync as the lighter approach.
Regular node or archive node?
A normal node is non-archival and keeps only the last five epochs. To retain historical data, set "archive": true in config.json before synchronizing. Archival synchronization can take a long time. Backups can reduce catch-up time after rebuilding a machine, but they do not remove the need to validate that the backup is current and usable.
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Operational checklist
- Provision fast local storage sized for the chain data and expected growth.
- Provide sustained network bandwidth for synchronization and peer traffic.
- Restrict administrative access, protect RPC exposure, and decide whether clients require an authenticated reverse proxy.
- Monitor synchronization height, peer count, disk utilization, request latency, error rates, and process health.
- Plan software upgrades, configuration changes, key rotation, and rollback procedures.
- Back up configuration and any indexed data whose reconstruction would be expensive.
- Assign an on-call owner for a stalled sync, disk failure, network partition, or corrupted data.
Self-hosting is usually justified when data sovereignty, predictable internal traffic, custom indexing, or archival ownership matters more than minimizing operations. It is rarely the cheapest option once compute, storage, bandwidth, engineering time, and support coverage are counted together.
Provider and self-hosted choices compared
| Decision factor | Legacy public URLs | Managed provider | Self-hosted node |
|---|---|---|---|
| Availability | Deprecated; documented limits are 30 requests/minute and 75 requests/10 minutes for regular access after August 1, 2025 | Managed capacity subject to the selected plan; current limits must be verified | Your team owns uptime, capacity, and failover |
| Latency and routing | Not a dependable production characteristic | Provider may offer distributed routing; exact regions vary | You choose placement but must operate suitable network capacity |
| Historical data | Archival limits are lower and availability is not a safe assumption | Select a provider’s archival product when needed | Set "archive": true and provision long-term storage |
| Security work | Little control over policy or credentials | Protect API keys and control who can call the endpoint | Secure the host, perimeter, RPC access, patches, and credentials |
| Operations | Limited but unsuitable for dependable workloads | Provider handles node operations | You handle sync, upgrades, backups, monitoring, and incidents |
| Pricing information | Free service is deprecated | Usage tiers and archive surcharges: not stated in the cited documentation | Compute, storage, bandwidth, and staffing costs: not stated as a fixed amount |
Choose an endpoint by workload
Local experiments and light development
Use testnet regular RPC from a managed provider, or a legacy public URL only while confirming that your code handles rate limits and endpoint changes. Keep the URL in an environment variable so moving to a paid endpoint does not require a code release. Do not test production assumptions against a deprecated service.
Typical production applications
Choose a managed regular endpoint. FastNear is attractive when you want a NEAR-specific service with published regular and archival addresses. QuickNode suits teams that want a dashboard-led setup, HTTP and WSS choices, and a provider workflow that also supports other chains. Add a second provider only when the application’s availability target justifies health checks, failover logic, and the extra operational complexity.
Analytics, explorers, and historical investigations
Use archival RPC or build an indexed pipeline from an archival node or Lake output. Separate historical jobs from latency-sensitive transaction traffic, apply caching, and queue expensive scans so a backfill cannot exhaust the same quota used by the application API.
Regulated, private, or high-control environments
Self-hosting gives you control over network placement, access policy, logs, and retention. You still need a plan for external chain connectivity, because a private node does not eliminate peer networking or synchronization requirements.
Migrating from a public endpoint
- Inventory every service, script, wallet backend, indexer, and monitoring check that uses a near.org or pagoda.co URL.
- Classify each call as current-state, transaction submission, WebSocket subscription, or historical query.
- Choose a managed regular URL for current traffic and an archival URL or node for historical traffic.
- Move the URL and credentials into server-side environment configuration. Rotate any key that has appeared in source control or client code.
- Run the same
status, block, state, and transaction tests against the new endpoint. - Measure latency, error responses, rate-limit headers or messages, and WebSocket reconnect behavior under realistic load.
- Deploy with a rollback switch, then remove the deprecated URL after observing a complete traffic cycle.
For clients using near-api-js, preserve the native method calls and replace the provider endpoint. Test archive-dependent methods separately; a successful current-state request does not prove that old state is available.
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Common failure modes and fixes
Requests suddenly return rate-limit errors
This is expected when an application exceeds the deprecated public limits or a managed plan’s quota. Add exponential backoff for transient failures, cache immutable block results, batch work where the API permits it, and move sustained traffic to a plan with documented capacity.
An old block or receipt cannot be found
You are probably using regular RPC or a non-archival self-hosted node. Route the query to an archival endpoint, or rebuild the required history from an archival node and indexed object-storage output.
Transactions work but subscriptions disconnect
Check that the selected product supports WSS, that your client sends the provider’s required authentication, and that reconnect logic resumes from a known block or application cursor. HTTP support alone does not imply WebSocket support.
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A self-hosted node never catches up
Check disk space and I/O latency, peer connectivity, clock accuracy, configuration validity, and whether the synchronization method is appropriate. Epoch Sync is the recommended lighter approach in NEAR’s guidance for non-local networks. Restore a verified backup when a full archival resynchronization would be unnecessarily long.
API credentials leak
Revoke and replace the key, inspect logs and source-control history, and enforce server-side secret injection. Restrict the replacement key to the smallest practical set of origins, methods, or networks supported by the provider.
Bottom-line decision
Use managed RPC for most production NEAR applications: it avoids node operations while providing capacity and, when selected, archival access. Choose FastNear for a NEAR-specific regular/archive split, or QuickNode for a dashboard-oriented HTTP/WSS workflow. Use Ankr only after confirming its current paid-plan limits and retention. Run your own node when control, custom policy, or archival ownership outweighs the cost and responsibility of operating synchronization, storage, monitoring, backups, and upgrades. Leave the deprecated near.org and pagoda.co endpoints to legacy compatibility and temporary tests, not new high-volume production systems.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Are the old near.org and pagoda.co NEAR RPC endpoints completely offline?
They may still answer some requests to reduce legacy breakage, but NEAR classified the services as fully deprecated. Their documented post-August 1, 2025 limits make them unsuitable as a dependable production default.
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Usually not. Current account state, recent blocks, and transaction submission generally fit regular RPC. Choose archival access only when you must query old blocks, receipts, or historical contract state.
Can I switch a near-api-js application to QuickNode without rewriting it?
QuickNode documents native NEAR JSON-RPC methods and says existing near-api-js integrations can use its endpoint by changing the provider configuration. Test authentication, WebSocket behavior, and any archive-dependent calls separately.
Is a self-hosted NEAR node automatically archival?
No. A normal node retains only the last five epochs. Archival mode requires setting "archive": true in config.json and completing the longer synchronization and storage process.
What should I verify before buying a hosted NEAR RPC plan?
Confirm mainnet and testnet availability, HTTP and WSS support, regular versus archive retention, request quotas, burst behavior, regions, overage pricing, support, and SLA terms. These details vary by vendor and plan.
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