Best NFT APIs: The 2026 Guide

NFTs have matured well beyond JPEGs on Ethereum. Today's NFT ecosystem spans dozens of chains, thousands of collections, and use cases from gaming items to real-world asset tokenization. Building a product on top of this data requires reliable access to NFT metadata, ownership records, prices, and transactions across multiple networks.

That's where NFT APIs come in. This guide covers what NFT APIs do, the features that matter most, and how the leading providers compare.

Overview of NFT APIs

An NFT API gives developers structured access to non-fungible token data without running their own indexing infrastructure. At a minimum, it lets you query which NFTs a wallet holds, retrieve metadata and media, and track ownership changes over time.

The complexity underneath is easy to underestimate. 

NFT metadata lives across IPFS, Arweave, centralized servers, and on-chain storage. Each of these methods has different retrieval patterns, failure modes, and latencies. Media files need to be cached and served reliably. Ownership records require real-time chain indexing that accounts for transfers, burns, lazy mints, and contract-specific mechanics. Spam filtering alone is a significant engineering effort. Without filtering, you’d get hundreds of scam NFTs alongside legitimate holdings.

A good NFT API handles all of this so you can focus on building features, not infrastructure.

Why NFT APIs matter

NFT APIs are foundational infrastructure for any application that displays or interacts with NFTs.

Without them, developers would need to run archive nodes, build custom indexers for every supported chain, maintain metadata scrapers, and handle media caching. That's months of engineering before you write a single line of product code.

Beyond development speed, NFT APIs directly shape user experience. 

The quality of metadata, the speed of ownership lookups, and the effectiveness of spam filtering all determine whether an NFT product feels polished or broken.

Key functionalities

The core capabilities of NFT APIs fall into several categories.

• Data retrieval and analytics. This includes fetching NFT metadata (name, description, traits, rarity), token media (images, video, 3D models), collection-level stats (number of items, trading volumes, market cap), and historical pricing data. The best APIs return enriched metadata processed into consistent, web-friendly formats.
• Ownership and verification. Accurately tracking who owns what is essential for token gating, airdrops, loyalty programs, and marketplace operations. This means real-time ownership data, transfer history, and the ability to verify holdings at the wallet or collection level.
• Marketplace and pricing data. Applications need access to listing data, sale history, floor prices, and marketplace-specific information.
• Cross-chain support. NFTs exist across Ethereum, Solana, Base, Arbitrum, Polygon, and many other networks. An API that only covers Ethereum misses a growing share of NFT activity. The best APIs aggregate data across chains into a unified schema so developers don't need to build per-chain logic.

What to Look for in an NFT API

Chain and collection coverage

The NFT landscape is multichain. Ethereum still has the highest-value collections, but Base, Arbitrum, Solana, and other L2s are where much of the new activity is happening. An NFT API should support the chains where your users hold assets, and it should do so without requiring separate integrations per chain.

Data quality and freshness

NFT metadata is messier than fungible token data. Images break, IPFS gateways go down, metadata servers disappear. A strong NFT API actively caches media, re-resolves broken metadata, and keeps ownership data current with minimal lag. 

Spam filtering

This is not a nice-to-have. Wallets without spam filtering display dozens of scam NFTs and airdropped phishing tokens. This confuses users and, in the worst case, leads to stolen funds. 

Scalability and performance

For consumer applications, NFT data needs to load fast. A wallet showing a user's NFT collection can't take 5 seconds per chain. Efficient pagination and pre-indexed data are necessary for products serving real traffic.

Top NFT APIs

Zerion API

Zerion API is part of the same data infrastructure that powers Zerion Wallet and is used by products including Uniswap Wallet, Kraken Wallet, and Coinbase. While Zerion is widely known for its DeFi position tracking, its NFT endpoints are built with the same philosophy: multichain by default, with data normalized into a consistent schema.

What it does well. Zerion's NFT endpoints return a wallet's complete NFT holdings across all supported EVM chains in a single call. Each position includes metadata, collection info, floor price, and media. You can sort by floor price, filter by chain, and include related collection data, all without separate per-chain queries. The API also filters out spam NFTs by default, so your application doesn't need its own spam detection layer.

Multichain architecture. This is Zerion's core advantage in the NFT space as well. One call to the NFT positions endpoint returns positions across 25+ chains with NFT support. For wallets and portfolio trackers that need to display a user's full NFT holdings, this single-call approach is significantly simpler to implement and faster for end users.

Unified wallet data. Because Zerion API covers tokens, DeFi positions, transactions, PnL, and NFTs within the same platform, you can build a complete portfolio experience with a single integration. You're not stitching together one provider for fungible tokens, another for DeFi positions, and a third for NFTs. This reduces integration complexity and ensures consistent data quality across your product.

Pricing: NFT API is included in monthly plans that start with a free ‘developer’ plan with up to 2,000 calls per month. Paid plans start at $149/month and include up to 250,000 requests per month. 

Alchemy NFT API

Alchemy is primarily known as a node infrastructure provider, and its NFT API is an extension of that broader platform. It's one of the most widely adopted NFT APIs, particularly among Ethereum-native developers.

What it does well. Alchemy's NFT API covers a solid range of use cases: fetching NFT metadata, ownership data, floor prices, rarity scores, and on-chain sales data. It supports 30+ chains and includes features like image caching through its NFT CDN. The API also offers batch metadata retrieval, contract-level queries, and webhooks for tracking NFT transfers in real time.

Where it shows limits. Alchemy's strength is infrastructure breadth rather than wallet-specific data depth. The NFT API is part of a much larger platform that includes RPC nodes, enhanced APIs, and developer tooling. For teams that only need NFT and wallet data, Alchemy can feel like more than necessary. The pricing model uses compute units, and NFT-specific calls consume varying amounts depending on complexity, which can make cost prediction hard.

Pricing. The free tier includes 30 million compute units per month. Paid tiers use a pay-as-you-go model based on compute units.

Moralis NFT API

Moralis positions its NFT API as part of a broader Web3 development platform, aimed at getting developers productive quickly across multiple blockchain data types.

What it does well. Moralis offers more than 15 NFT-specific endpoints covering metadata retrieval, ownership verification, transfer history, collection stats, and on-chain trade data. It includes useful enrichments out of the box: spam indicators for NFT collections, dynamically sized image previews, marketplace metadata on trades (including which marketplace a sale occurred on), and floor pricing. The API supports 10+ EVM chains and is expanding.

Developer experience. This is Moralis's strong suit. The documentation is thorough, the SDKs are well-maintained, and the platform is designed for rapid prototyping. Moralis reports that users cut development time by roughly 75% compared to building in-house. For teams building their first NFT product, the onboarding experience is smooth.

Where it falls short. Moralis requires per-chain queries for NFT data. If you need a user's NFT holdings across 10 chains, that's 10 separate API calls that your backend needs to orchestrate and merge. This adds latency and complexity, especially for multichain wallets and portfolio trackers. Moralis also doesn't currently offer an integrated portfolio view that combines NFTs with DeFi positions and fungible tokens in a single response.

Pricing. A free tier is available for testing. Paid plans start at $49/month (billed annually), with compute units varying by endpoint.

OpenSea API

OpenSea's API occupies a unique position in the NFT ecosystem: it provides access to the largest NFT marketplace's data, including listings, offers, and trading activity that exist nowhere else on-chain.

What it does well. OpenSea's API gives developers access to marketplace-specific data: active listings, live offers, order book depth, and trading events from the OpenSea marketplace. It also offers a Stream API (WebSocket) for real-time event notifications. The V2 API supports multiple chains, including Ethereum, Solana, Base, Arbitrum, Polygon, and several newer networks.

Marketplace integration. If you're building an NFT marketplace or aggregator, OpenSea's API is a near-requirement. It provides programmatic access to create listings, make offers, and complete trades through the opensea-js SDK. 

Where it falls short. OpenSea's API is tightly coupled to the OpenSea marketplace. It's excellent for marketplace data and trading operations, but was not designed as a general-purpose NFT data API. It doesn't provide portfolio-level views, doesn't aggregate data across other NFT marketplaces, and doesn't offer wallet-centric endpoints that combine NFTs with fungible tokens or DeFi positions. 

Best for: Applications that specifically need OpenSea marketplace data, trading functionality, or real-time marketplace event streams.

SimpleHash (discontinued)

SimpleHash deserves mention here because it was, until early 2025, one of the most respected NFT data APIs in the ecosystem. It supported 80+ chains and had built a reputation for data reliability and completeness.

What happened. In February 2025, Phantom acquired SimpleHash. As part of the acquisition, SimpleHash's standalone API was sunset on March 27, 2025. The entire team joined Phantom, and the technology now powers Phantom rather than serving external developers.

Why it matters. SimpleHash's shutdown left a gap in the market. The acquisition underscores an important risk of depending on startup APIs: when a well-funded company decides to acquire the data layer, external customers can lose access overnight.

The right NFT API for your use case

If you're building a wallet or portfolio tracker, Zerion API is the most efficient choice. Its single-call multichain architecture returns all NFTs alongside tokens and DeFi positions in a unified schema. You get spam filtering, floor prices, and cached media out of the box. One integration covers your entire portfolio display, rather than stitching together separate NFT and token APIs.

And if your application needs to display more than just NFTs, strongly consider an API that covers all three in a single platform, so your data layer doesn't become your biggest source of complexity.

Ready to try Zerion API? Get your free developer key and start building with multichain NFT data, token balances, and DeFi positions, all from a single integration.