Choosing the Right Surface
Do not start by exposing every FastNear endpoint to an agent. Start by matching the tool surface to the question.
| Agent question | Best surface | Why |
|---|---|---|
| "What is the exact on-chain account state?" | RPC Reference | Raw RPC keeps the response closest to NEAR nodes. |
| "What balances, NFTs, or staking positions does this account have?" | FastNear API | Indexed account views are faster to consume than multiple RPC calls. |
| "What transactions or receipts touched this account?" | Transactions API | History is already indexed for account, block, and receipt lookups. |
| "What changed in the most recent blocks?" | NEAR Data API | It works well for near-realtime polling and block-family reads. |
| "How do I stand up the infrastructure first?" | Snapshots | Snapshot workflows are for operators, not application tools. |
Rule of thumb
- Prefer indexed APIs when the answer is already product-shaped.
- Drop to raw RPC when correctness depends on canonical protocol behavior.
- Keep NEAR Data for polling-oriented freshness checks.
- Treat snapshots as an infrastructure path, not an application query path.