All-in on Optimized Metadata: NFTs & ERC20s in Insight
ArseniiWe’ve just completed a full rollout of metadata performance upgrades across all NFT-related API routes — and started extending the same treatment to ERC20s.
Every API call involving NFT metadata now performs a single, efficient data read per request — even for multichain queries. Whether you're pulling transfers, balances, or metadata directly, things just got a whole lot faster.
🚀 Performance Gains: NFT Metadata Latency Drops by 10x+
We’ve slashed the latency for NFT metadata queries — and the numbers speak for themselves. For example, data for GET /v1/nfts/:contract_address
| Metric | Before | After | 🔻 Improvement |
|---|---|---|---|
| p50 | 103 ms | 5.9 ms | ~17× faster |
| p75 | 152 ms | 13.4 ms | ~11× faster |
| p90 | 243 ms | 54.8 ms | ~4.4× faster |
| p95 | 327 ms | 99.3 ms | ~3.3× faster |
| p99 | 464 ms | 192.1 ms | ~2.4× faster |
| p99.9 | 555 ms | 242.3 ms | ~2.3× faster |
| Max | 756 ms | 290.2 ms | ~2.6× faster |
GET /v1/nftsandGET /v1/nfts/transfersalso saw solid improvements in the ~1.1× to 2.9× range, with reduced tail latencies and smoother performance across the board.- Not just faster — more consistent, with reduced tail latencies and fewer spikes in production.
- These performance gains are now live for all metadata queries hitting the NFT endpoints.
We’ve started persisting ERC20 metadata as well, laying the foundation for more efficient token balance queries with rich metadata. Stay tuned — optimized joined queries are on the way.
We’ve consolidated NFT balance queries under a single route:/v1/nfts/balance/{ownerAddress}
This new endpoint works across ERC721 and ERC1155 standards, supports multichain queries out of the box, and is the one we recommend going forward.
Heads up: the old ERC721/ERC1155-specific balance endpoints are still live, but are now officially deprecated.
This makes it easier than ever to query, display, and work with NFTs and tokens at scale — with less overhead and more consistency.