// the find
ethereum-lists/chains
provides metadata for chains
A community-maintained registry of every EVM-compatible chain, keyed by chain ID. Each chain gets a JSON file with RPC endpoints, native currency, explorers, and parent-chain relationships. The de-facto source of truth that MetaMask, wagmi, and most EVM tooling pull from.
The collision-prevention model is sound — first PR wins, deprecated chains get a `reusedChainID` flag instead of silent reassignment, which actually matters for replay attack protection. The L2/shard parent-chain linking gives you the full topology, not just a flat list. The aggregated JSON endpoints at chainid.network mean you can consume this without cloning the repo. CI validates every PR with a Kotlin-based checker plus Prettier, so data quality is enforced rather than hoped for.
RPC entries go stale constantly — public endpoints disappear or get rate-limited, and there's no automated liveness checking, so consumers silently fail on dead URLs. The repo has north of 8000 forks and daily PR volume, which means the maintainers are drowning; response time on PRs is slow and the stale-bot is doing real work here. Icon storage via IPFS CIDs is a bet on IPFS gateway reliability that doesn't always pay off — pinata is explicitly banned, and some CIDs become unreachable. No versioning or changelog per chain entry means you can't tell when an RPC list was last verified or whether a status change was intentional.