RPC / RPC Endpoint
What is an RPC endpoint in blockchain?
Every wallet interaction travels through a server somebody operates. Checking a balance, simulating a transaction and broadcasting it are all requests to an endpoint, and unless you run your own node you are trusting that server to report chain state honestly. Self-custody of keys does not extend to self-custody of the view.
Three exposures follow, and they are independent of each other. Availability is the visible one, and a provider outage takes down applications that present themselves as decentralized. When Infura failed in November 2020, exchanges including Binance paused Ethereum withdrawals until service returned. Privacy is quieter, because the endpoint sees your IP address alongside the addresses you query, which links them.
Censorship is the one most users never consider. After the Treasury sanctioned Tornado Cash in August 2022, major providers began blocking requests associated with those addresses. The chain itself had not changed. The road to it had.
Defaults concentrate this risk, since most wallets ship preset to a single provider, which is how a decentralized ecosystem ends up depending on a handful of endpoints. Running your own node removes the dependency. Short of that, change the default and verify anything that matters against a second source.