Eric Saunders from the Stellar Development Foundation discusses Horizon's evolution from 2015 to present, covering the ingestion rebuild in v1.0, the Captive Core innovation in v2.0, and future scaling plans including tiered data storage and federated search.
Eric Saunders, Director of Engineering at the Stellar Development Foundation, presents Horizon's past and future. Horizon 1.0 rebuilt the ingestion layer from scratch, extracting it into a standalone library to decouple Horizon from Stellar Core's database and enable new community tools. Horizon 2.0 introduced Captive Core, a lightweight in-memory Stellar Core instance that simplified operations and enabled parallel catch-up, reducing full history sync time from weeks to days. Looking ahead, the team is exploring tiered data storage separating recent high-availability data from older historical data, federated search across Horizon instances, configurable endpoints to reduce storage requirements, and community-built tools using the ingestion library to create alternative gateways to Stellar.