Horizon 2.0 introduces a modular architecture that decouples Horizon from Stellar Core, enabling developers to run infrastructure with significantly fewer resources, faster ingestion times, and greater flexibility. The new Captive Core approach reduces disk requirements by hundreds of gigabytes and cuts ingestion time from weeks to about a day.
Horizon 2.0 fundamentally redesigns how Stellar infrastructure operates by introducing Captive Core, an optimized version of Stellar Core that processes ledgers in-memory without requiring a separate database. This modular architecture allows developers to choose between running a validator or just running Horizon, eliminating the previous requirement to run both together. Key improvements include: disk space reduction by hundreds of gigabytes, ingestion speed improvement from weeks to approximately one day, independent scaling of Horizon instances, and dramatically reduced system requirements. The new design also simplifies configuration by auto-generating most necessary parameters, making it accessible to both large organizations and small developers. Developers can now easily switch between architectures or run both independently, providing unprecedented flexibility in deployment options.
