Stellar Development Foundation released Horizon v0.20.1 with a new ingestion system that addresses architectural issues by building a full copy of ledger state from history archives instead of relying on Stellar-Core's database. The update enables new features like "Accounts for Signers" and significantly improves path-finding performance by up to 10x.
The Stellar Development Foundation announced a major architectural overhaul of Horizon, the network's API server, to address long-standing performance and consistency issues. The new ingestion system, included in Horizon v0.20.1, builds a complete ledger state from history archives rather than querying Stellar-Core's database directly, eliminating load on the consensus layer and enabling historical state queries. This redesign solves three critical problems: Stellar-Core's database schema wasn't optimized for Horizon queries, high query load could destabilize consensus, and data inconsistencies could occur between the two systems. The new system enables two experimental features: "Accounts for Signers" allows users to discover all accounts they co-sign with a single key, and an improved path-finding algorithm that uses an in-memory order book graph to reduce response times by up to 10x. The new ingestion package can also be used independently to build custom applications. Both systems currently run concurrently, and developers can test the new features with the `ENABLE_EXPERIMENTAL_INGESTION=true` flag.
