Deprecation of NEAR.org and Pagoda.co RPC Endpoints

After careful consideration and approval by the Infrastructure Committee, NEAR will implement a phased deprecation of the free public RPC endpoints under near.org and pagoda.co, beginning June 1, 2025. This deprecation aims to create a more sustainable and decentralized ecosystem, and follows Pagoda winding down operations and decentralizing its functions into NEAR ecosystem teams and committees.

Why This Change?

As former Pagoda CTO and Managing Director Eric Winer (currently of NEAR AI) discussed while announcing Pagoda’s wind-down: “The Infrastructure Committee feels that Pagoda’s fully-subsidized near.org RPC service was getting in the way of decentralization efforts and preventing high-quality commercial RPC offerings from gaining traction.”

Deprecating near.org and pagoda.co RPC endpoints will help ensure a more sustainable ecosystem by directing traffic to providers specifically focused on RPC infrastructure.

What’s Changing

All public RPC endpoints under the NEAR.org and pagoda.co domains, including both regular and archival endpoints, will undergo a gradual deprecation through increasingly restricted rate limits. These changes will affect all of the following endpoints:

rpc.*.near.org
archival-rpc.*.near.org
rpc.*.pagoda.co
archival-rpc.*.pagoda.co
Additional related endpoints (v2, internal, beta)

Timeline and Rate Limit Changes

New 10-minute rate limits will be implemented to prevent production usage of the RPC endpoints.

The deprecation will occur in three phases:

Phase 1: Beginning June 1, 2025

RPC Mainnet: 120 RPM, 600 requests per 10 minutes
RPC Testnet: 120 RPM, 600 requests per 10 minutes
Archival-RPC Mainnet: 16 RPM, 80 requests per 10 minutes
Archival-RPC Testnet: 80 RPM, 400 requests per 10 minutes

Phase 2: Beginning July 1, 2025

RPC Mainnet: 60 RPM, 150 requests per 10 minutes
RPC Testnet: 60 RPM, 150 requests per 10 minutes
Archival-RPC Mainnet: 8 RPM, 20 requests per 10 minutes
Archival-RPC Testnet: 40 RPM, 100 requests per 10 minutes

Phase 3: Beginning August 1, 2025

RPC Mainnet: 30 RPM, 75 requests per 10 minutes
RPC Testnet: 30 RPM, 75 requests per 10 minutes
Archival-RPC Mainnet: 4 RPM, 10 requests per 10 minutes
Archival-RPC Testnet: 20 RPM, 50 requests per 10 minutes

After August 1, FastNear will continue to maintain these endpoints with the final reduced rate limits to prevent complete breakage of legacy tools, but they will be considered fully deprecated.

What Action Developers Need to Take

NEAR strongly recommends that all developers migrate away from these endpoints entirely within the next 30 days (by June 1, 2025).

After this date, any large-scale backend usage may be blocked by IP address. The short-term burst limits combined with tight per-minute restrictions will make these endpoints unsuitable for continuous usage.

Alternative RPC Providers

NEAR recommends migrating to one of the following RPC providers:

FastNear
Lava Network
See full list here: https://docs.near.org/api/rpc/providers

For projects with high-volume requirements, NEAR recommends considering:

Setting up dedicated NEAR nodes
Subscribing to a paid tier with one of the RPC providers above

Stay tuned at NEAR.org to learn more about NEAR’s progress toward a stronger, more decentralized ecosystem.