Westend

This section outlines how to use our API endpoint to connect to Westend.

Westend is the primary test network of Polkadot. The tokens on this network are called Westies (WND) and they purposefully hold no economic value.

How to Connect to Westend

You can connect to Westend using Blockops private API endpoints. Secure your data, speed up your queries, and take control of your API usage with our RPC API endpoint and personalized API keys. Sign up now to get your own API key.

To get your API key, create a project using a unique Identifier as the project name and select westend from the network options.

Create a westend project

Open the project to view your api key and rpc endpoints.

view westend project

Send requests

All requests are POST requests.

Connect via Command Line

You can connect to the network using websocket or HTTP with your API key in two ways:

• Adding the API key as a query string ?api_key=${APIKEY}

• Or the request header -H 'authorization: APIKEY ${APIKEY}'

Curl

For example, the following CURL command can be used to get header and body of a relay chain block.

curl -H "Content-Type: application/json" -H 'authorization: APIKEY xxxx'  -d '{"id":1, "jsonrpc":"2.0", "method": "chain_getBlock"}' https://westend.blockops.network/rpc

Here is the response you will receive back.

{"jsonrpc":"2.0","result":{"block":{"header":{"parentHash":"0x381dd358f0b1e328e861822b2a51a72e8dc064803a5c7ccc96277da3b16d7667","number":"0xe07a1d","stateRoot":"0xa2aacd7ef5d7ff66da1df6643b3e1c13975d210363c568f1bed51bad56cf40db","extrinsicsRoot":"0x00bc7f1504c9a07364835d80d2114ca3d4e7ad774453198b119bea9be2a1f7c1","digest":{"logs":["0x0642414245b50103d8000000d17aae1000000000768dc1931ba697bb9ab4a08debf5d710bd1f55e6325d65315161c2340cc0217170dfe2df24a3680c8ff48868ac665f4b34ebefa4bc844d510c848d9fc99252035db579a0acbf52cded336d6daf6ab7fdb1d1eee0d480e6388c2a12785d4de809"]},"justifications":null},"id":1}

Wscat

If you want to send data requests with WebSockets, you can use several libraries or wscat. You can install and use wscat as follows:

• Download wscat from https://www.npmjs.com/package/wscat

• Install wscat by running the following command: npm install -g wscat

You can connect to the network with wscat using two options by adding the API key as a query string.

wscat -c 'wss://westend.blockops.network/ws?api_key=*********************'

Or the request header.

wscat -c 'wss://westend.blockops.network/ws' --header 'authorization: APIKEY xxxx'

After executing the command, the terminal will display a message indicating that the connection has been enabled successfully.

Connected (press CTRL+C to quit)
>

Then, you can send the following request:

{"id":1, "jsonrpc":"2.0", "method": "chain_getBlock"}

For more information on the Westend network, please see the official Westend developer documentation.

Login or set up an account here to get started!

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