How to Get a Free Helius API Key
Helius provides free access to Solana blockchain data. You need an API key to pull your transaction history into LanaTax. Here's how to get one in about 30 seconds.
What is Helius?
Helius is one of the most reliable Solana RPC and API providers available. They specialize in making Solana blockchain data accessible to developers and tools — offering clean, parsed transaction data that goes well beyond what a raw RPC node provides.
When LanaTax fetches your transaction history, it uses the Helius API to retrieve a structured record of every trade, swap, stake, airdrop, and transfer associated with your wallet. The alternative — querying a raw Solana node — returns low-level binary data that requires significant parsing.
- ✓ Free tier: 100,000 API calls per month — more than enough for personal tax reporting
- ✓ Used in production by major Solana wallets, DEX aggregators, and analytics platforms
- ✓ No credit card required to sign up for the free tier
- ✓ Parsed transaction data — Helius identifies swaps, NFT sales, staking, and more automatically
Step-by-Step Setup ~30 seconds
Follow these steps exactly. Helius's dashboard changes occasionally, but the flow is the same.
- 1 Go to dev.helius.xyz in your browser.
- 2 Click "Sign Up" in the top right corner. You can sign up with GitHub (one click) or with an email address. Both work fine.
- 3 Once logged in, you'll land on the dashboard. Click "Create a New App" or look for the project creation prompt. Name it anything — "my-taxes", "lanatax", whatever you prefer. The name doesn't matter.
- 4 Click "Generate API Key" (or it may appear automatically after project creation). Helius will generate a unique key tied to your account.
- 5 Copy the key. It looks like this:
Paste that key into LanaTax when prompted. That's it.
Use Your Key on LanaTax →Rate Limits & Usage Free Tier
The Helius free tier gives you 100,000 credits per month. Here's what that means in practice:
- — Each API request consumes 1 credit. Simple balance lookups, transaction fetches, and signature queries all cost 1 credit each.
- — Enhanced transaction parsing (the format LanaTax uses) may cost slightly more per call — typically 2–5 credits for complex transactions.
- — LanaTax fetches approximately 1 API call per 100 transactions in batch mode, plus individual calls for enrichment. A wallet with 1,000 transactions will use roughly 50–100 credits total.
- ✓ Even very active wallets (10,000+ transactions) stay well within the free monthly limit for tax reporting purposes.
- — Rate limit on the free tier is approximately 10 requests per second. LanaTax respects this automatically with built-in throttling.
Credits reset on the first of each month. If you're doing year-end tax prep, one month's worth of free credits is almost certainly enough for everything you need.
Troubleshooting Common Issues
If something isn't working when you paste your key into LanaTax, here are the most common causes:
- ✗ 401 Unauthorized error — Your key is wrong or invalid. Double-check by going back to the Helius dashboard. Make sure you copied the entire key with no leading or trailing spaces. The key should be exactly 36 characters including hyphens.
- ✗ 429 Too Many Requests — You've hit the rate limit. This usually resolves itself within a few seconds. LanaTax will automatically retry, but if you're manually testing, wait 10–15 seconds and try again.
- ✗ Timeout / no response — Helius may be experiencing elevated load. This is rare but does happen. Check status.helius.xyz for incidents, and try again in a few minutes.
- ✗ 403 Forbidden — Your free tier may have a domain restriction set. Go into your Helius project settings and make sure there are no referrer or domain restrictions blocking browser-based requests.
- ✓ Key not found in dashboard — If you created a project but don't see the key, try refreshing the page. Keys sometimes take a moment to appear after initial generation.