Project

About fullnode

It started as an internal adapter layer at a payments shop that had to watch four chains at once and got tired of four half-maintained clients. It was extracted, rewritten as a Django app, and released under MIT in 2023. It has been the same shape ever since.

What it is

A thin, honest gateway. It speaks to full nodes you control, normalises their answers into one schema, and gets out of the way. It holds no keys, signs nothing, custodies nothing, and stores only an address index you can drop and rebuild.

What it is not

Not a node. It does not sync a chain. You bring the nodes, or you point it at public ones and accept their rate limits.
Not a wallet. Broadcasting takes an already-signed transaction. There is nowhere to put a private key and that is deliberate.
Not an indexer. Deep historical queries belong in something built for them. The address index covers recent history so that /address/<a>/txs is useful, and no further.
Not a paid API with an open-source veneer. The public gateway exists so the docs have something to point at. Everything it does, your own install does.

Design notes

Three decisions get questioned often enough to write down.

Amounts are strings. Eight decimals of BTC and eighteen of BNB do not both fit in an IEEE double, and a JSON number is a double in most clients whatever the spec says. Integer base units plus decimals is ugly to read and impossible to get subtly wrong.

raw is always present. Normalisation loses information by definition. Rather than argue about which fields deserve promotion, the adapter promotes what every chain has and keeps the original document verbatim beside it.

The stream protocol is versioned separately from REST. REST has not broken since 1.0 and should not have to carry a version bump because the wire framing on streams changed. Hence /api/v1/ next to /api/v3/, which looks like a mistake and is not — see versioning.

Contributing

Adapters are the useful contribution. One lives in fullnode/adapters/<chain>.py, implements six methods, and is tested against a recorded fixture set rather than a live node so the suite runs offline. If you run a chain we do not support and can describe its RPC in a paragraph, open an issue before writing code — half of the work is deciding what maps onto transfers[].

Issues and pull requests: github.com/fullnode-api/fullnode
Style: ruff and black, both enforced in CI.
Tests: pytest, no network access in the default run.
Licence: MIT, no CLA.

Release history

version	Date	Notes
3.2.1	2026-07-30	TON adapter reads from a liteserver pool instead of a single endpoint.
3.2.0	2026-06-11	Cursor pagination on `/address/<a>/txs`; offsets deprecated.
3.1.4	2026-05-02	Rate limiter no longer counts CORS preflight.
3.0.0	2026-01-19	`/api/v3/` streams: binary framing, resumable cursors. `/api/v2/` removed.
2.4.0	2025-09-08	BNB Smart Chain adapter.
1.0.0	2023-04-02	First release: Bitcoin, Solana, TRON.

Contact

Bugs and feature requests go to the issue tracker, where they are visible to everyone. For anything about the public gateway itself — an address hammering it, a node stuck behind — ops@full-node.online reaches the people who run it.