Soroban state expiration and Horizon partial history retention create data persistence and UX challenges. Stellar Expert analyzes the tradeoffs and proposes permanent storage classes, database optimization, and alternative storage architectures.
Soroban's state expiration concept causes smart contract data to disappear unless periodically bumped with fees, forcing developers to manage data resurrection or rely on third-party services. Horizon's partial history retention makes older transactions inaccessible through standard APIs, breaking wallet UX for accounts with no recent activity. Together, these decisions shift data responsibility to external providers while complicating recovery workflows. Stellar Expert proposes three concrete improvements: permanent storage classes for contract state (higher creation cost, lower updates), database optimization through deduplication and compression (60% size reduction possible), and transitioning to in-process databases like LevelDB or RocksDB, storing both ledger state and history in BucketsDB for better performance and built-in data deduplication.
