I agree with @Pol Espinasa’s explanation above, Bitcoin Core cannot return UTXOs for an arbitrary address unless that address belongs to a wallet that Bitcoin Core has loaded.
For addresses that don’t belong to your wallet, you would typically rely on an indexer or a public data provider instead of scanning the chain yourself.
Full disclosure: I work on Tatum’s indexing infrastructure.
We maintain a UTXO index for all Bitcoin addresses, so you can query any address directly without importing it into a wallet or rescanning:
Here’s the sample request :
curl --request GET \
--url 'https://api.tatum.io/v4/data/utxos?chain=bitcoin&address=YOUR_ADDRESS' \
--header 'accept: application/json' \
--header 'x-api-key: YOUR_API_KEY'
And the sample response :
[
{
"txHash": "6cd3bcb491b562ac8931e7684f6cb373c6be9ac4cbad084ee7b1e5b51df88037",
"index": 2,
"value": 4.15977295,
"valueAsString": "4.15977295",
"address": "bc1q7cyrfmck2ffu2ud3rn5l5a8yv6f0chkp0zpemf",
"chain": "bitcoin-mainnet"
}
...
]
Here’s the link to the docs : https://docs.tatum.io/reference/getutxosbyaddressv4
