Documentation exported from Bitcoin Core 0.16.2

getchaintips (0.16.2 RPC)

blockchain

control

generating

mining

network

rawtransactions

util

wallet

getchaintips
Return information about all known tips in the block tree, including the main chain as well as orphaned branches.

Result:
[
  {
    "height": xxxx,         (numeric) height of the chain tip
    "hash": "xxxx",         (string) block hash of the tip
    "branchlen": 0          (numeric) zero for main chain
    "status": "active"      (string) "active" for the main chain
  },
  {
    "height": xxxx,
    "hash": "xxxx",
    "branchlen": 1          (numeric) length of branch connecting the tip to the main chain
    "status": "xxxx"        (string) status of the chain (active, valid-fork, valid-headers, headers-only, invalid)
  }
]
Possible values for status:
1.  "invalid"               This branch contains at least one invalid block
2.  "headers-only"          Not all blocks for this branch are available, but the headers are valid
3.  "valid-headers"         All blocks are available for this branch, but they were never fully validated
4.  "valid-fork"            This branch is not part of the active chain, but is fully validated
5.  "active"                This is the tip of the active main chain, which is certainly valid

Examples:
> bitcoin-cli getchaintips 
> curl --user myusername --data-binary '{"jsonrpc": "1.0", "id":"curltest", "method": "getchaintips", "params": [] }' -H 'content-type: text/plain;' http://127.0.0.1:8332/