Stellar API Quickstart

To use the Stellar API, you need an Alchemy account. Create a free account to get started.

What is Stellar?

Stellar is an open-source, decentralized blockchain network designed for fast, low-cost financial transactions and asset tokenization. It features Soroban, a smart contract platform built on Rust and WebAssembly (WASM), offering 5-second finality and a developer-friendly environment for building decentralized applications.

What is the Stellar API?

The Stellar API gives you access to Stellar RPC over JSON-RPC 2.0 through Alchemy. The transport is familiar if you have used JSON-RPC before, but the methods and response shapes are Stellar-specific rather than Ethereum-specific.

Get started

1. Create a project directory

Create a new directory for your example script:

mkdir stellar-api-quickstart
cd stellar-api-quickstart

2. Make your first request

Create an index.js file in your project directory and paste the following code. This example uses Node.js's built-in fetch API.

const apiKey = "your-api-key";
const url = `https://stellar-mainnet.g.alchemy.com/v2/${apiKey}`;
 
const payload = {
  jsonrpc: "2.0",
  id: 1,
  method: "getNetwork",
};
 
fetch(url, {
  method: "POST",
  headers: {
    "Content-Type": "application/json",
  },
  body: JSON.stringify(payload),
})
  .then((response) => response.json())
  .then((data) => {
    console.log(JSON.stringify(data, null, 2));
  })
  .catch((error) => {
    console.error(error);
  });

Replace your-api-key with your actual Alchemy API key from the Alchemy Dashboard.

This request calls getNetwork, a Stellar RPC method that returns information such as the network passphrase and protocol version.

3. Run your script

Run your script to make a request to the Stellar network:

node index.js

You should see a JSON-RPC response with a result object containing network details such as passphrase and protocolVersion.

Next steps

You've made your first request to the Stellar network. Next, you can:

• Call getLatestLedger to inspect the latest ledger metadata.
• Call getLedgerEntries to read live ledger state such as contract data and other ledger entries.
• Use the official stellar-sdk package when you're ready to build a larger JavaScript application against Stellar RPC and Horizon.

When you move beyond zero-parameter methods like getNetwork, keep in mind that Stellar RPC methods use named parameters for requests instead of Ethereum-style positional arrays.