# Overview

The Realm Provider API is a central service for Decentraland that provides intelligent realm discovery, real-time scene popularity tracking, and geo-optimized content delivery.

This API implements the realm selection and discovery mechanisms defined in [ADR-110](https://adr.decentraland.org/adr/ADR-110), serving as the primary gateway for Decentraland clients to connect to the optimal catalyst nodes based on user location, node health, and current capacity.

#### Key Features

**Realm Discovery & Selection**

* Discover all available catalyst realms with real-time user counts
* Automatic health monitoring and filtering of catalyst nodes
* Geo-location-based content server selection for optimal performance

**Hot Scenes Tracking**

* Real-time aggregation of the most popular scenes across all realms
* Scene popularity metrics including user distribution per realm
* Scene metadata including coordinates, parcels, and thumbnails

**Main Realm Services**

* Retrieve comprehensive service information for the main realm
* Access content server, communications, BFF, and lambdas configurations
* Support for preferred catalyst selection via query parameters

**Health & Monitoring**

* Service status and version information
* Health check endpoints for integration monitoring

#### Use Cases

This API is designed for:

* **Decentraland Clients**: Web and desktop clients that need to connect users to the optimal realm
* **Analytics & Monitoring**: Tools that track metaverse activity and infrastructure health
* **Third-Party Integrations**: Applications building on top of Decentraland infrastructure

The API aggregates data from multiple catalyst servers distributed globally to provide a unified, intelligent view of the Decentraland metaverse infrastructure.