Governance APIs

Governance Discovery pages matter when a team needs more than generic chain access and instead needs proposal, referendum, vote, delegation, or treasury visibility as an application feature. Readers here are usually evaluating how quickly they can get reliable governance state into alerts, dashboards, or product workflows

Claim-safe statuses distinguish source profiles, evaluation-only pages, requested integrations, and available gateway/tooling surfaces without exposing paid procurement, approval, or provider-fetching flows

At a glance

Category summary

Primary query: Governance API
Definition: Proposal, referendum, vote, and delegation data sources for governance workflows.
Sources: 3
Capabilities: 3
Chain hubs: 1
Use-case groups: 7
Last verified: 2026-06-04
PubFi status: Discovery comparison and request-routing surface; individual source pages carry claim-safe integration status.

Official-source citations

Subscan API Primary query: subscan api Source
Subscan API Primary coverage: Substrate accounts, extrinsics, governance, staking, and asset data Source
Subscan API Discovery category: On-chain state and governance Source
Subscan API Auth model: API-key authentication is required for live Subscan API use Source
Subscan API Commercial fact: Free API access is documented with one API key and a 5 req/sec limit; paid-plan pricing is not public in the support article Source
Subscan API PubFi status: PubFi gateway route documentation exists for Subscan; upstream account, auth, and route limits still apply Source
DotLake API Primary query: dotlake api Source
DotLake API Primary coverage: Polkadot, Kusama, Westend, Paseo, parachain, and solo Substrate ecosystem metrics Source
DotLake API Endpoint families: OpenAPI lists account, contract, coretime, governance, reliability, revenue, staking, summary, transaction, treasury, validator, and XCM metrics. Source
DotLake API Auth model: All endpoints require a DotLake API key used as a Bearer token after wallet-based registration. Source
DotLake API Freshness note: The Polkadot forum announcement describes daily updates for the API data coverage. Source
DotLake API Commercial fact: No public price, quota, or rate-limit schedule is listed in the OpenAPI description; users must sign in with a Polkadot wallet to obtain an API key. Source
DotLake API PubFi status: PubFi Discovery tracks DotLake API as a public source profile; PubFi does not expose a production DotLake gateway route in the current gateway readiness catalog. Source
Polkassembly Primary coverage: Governance discussions, proposals, referenda, and vote context for Polkadot and Kusama communities Source
Polkassembly Fixture coverage: Governance coverage for the Polkadot fixture target Source

Editorial overview

The governance category is narrower than broad on-chain-state coverage, but it is more decision-sensitive because freshness, completeness, and ecosystem-specific modeling all matter. In the current seed catalog, the main distinction is often between explorer-style indexed governance reads, governance-specific workflow tooling, and official aggregated governance metrics such as DotLake's OpenGov referendum and participation endpoints.

Start here recommendations

Subscan API

Why start here: A strong first stop when the team wants indexed Polkadot governance reads alongside broader Substrate account and staking visibility.
Best for: Teams starting with explorer-style governance data

Polkassembly

Why start here: Useful when the workflow is centered on governance participation, proposal tracking, and governance-specific context rather than generic chain data access.
Best for: Teams focused on governance workflows

DotLake API

Why start here: Use when the team needs official aggregated OpenGov participation or referendum-result metrics rather than governance discussion workflows.
Best for: Official aggregated governance metrics

Decision criteria and landscape gaps

Evaluation criteria

Whether proposal, referendum, vote, and delegation data are complete enough for the target governance workflow
How fresh governance state appears relative to the cadence the application needs
Whether the product surfaces governance as a first-class workflow or only as a subset of broader chain data

Provider landscape gaps

Governance data products often make coverage visible faster than they make completeness and freshness limits visible.
It is still easy to confuse broad on-chain-state coverage with governance-specific workflow support even when the buyer actually needs the latter.