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Using the Archival Service

The Archival Service provides access to historical Sui network data through the same LedgerService gRPC API available on full nodes. Use it as a fallback when your full node has pruned the data you need, or as a dedicated source for historical queries.

For core concepts, see the Archival Store and Service concepts page.

Public endpoints​

The Sui Foundation operates an Archival Service as a public good:

  • Testnet: archive.testnet.sui.io
  • Mainnet: archive.mainnet.sui.io

These endpoints have strict rate limits.

Querying the service​

The Archival Service exposes the same LedgerService gRPC API as a Sui full node. Query it using any gRPC client by pointing at an Archival Service endpoint instead of a full node.

See Using gRPC for detailed examples with grpcurl, Buf CLI, TypeScript, Go, and Python.

For example, to fetch a historical transaction using grpcurl:

grpcurl -d '{
  "digest": "BASE58_TX_DIGEST"
}' archive.testnet.sui.io:443 sui.rpc.v2.LedgerService/GetTransaction

Using the Archival Service as a fallback​

Apps can query the Archival Service when a full node returns retention-related errors. This provides a graceful fallback without requiring the full node to store historical data:

  1. Send your query to the full node.
  2. If the full node returns NOT_FOUND for data that should exist, retry against the Archival Service endpoint.

Running your own instance​

For production use or to avoid rate limits, you can run the full archival stack yourself. See the Archival Stack Setup operator guide for instructions on setting up Bigtable, the indexer, and the gRPC service.