The Stellar Development Foundation announced it will limit historical data access on its free Horizon service to one year of rolling data, effective August 1st, 2024. This change aims to reduce operational overhead and eliminate a centralized point of failure in the network, while directing users with longer historical data needs to alternative solutions like Hubble, third-party Horizon providers, or self-hosted infrastructure.
The SDF announced a significant change to its public Horizon service, limiting historical data retention to one year on a rolling basis with a truncation date of August 1st, 2024. The decision stems from Horizon's 40TB database spanning nearly a decade, where analysis shows 89% of requests only need the last month of data, while the remaining 10% of complex historical queries create unsustainable operational overhead. The SDF emphasized that reliance on its Horizon instances has created a dangerous single point of failure for the network, with activity dropping 90% during service degradation. The announcement provides multiple alternatives for affected users: third-party Horizon providers, Hubble (SDF's BigQuery dataset), self-hosted data storage, running Horizon locally, or using Soroban RPC. The SDF committed to a smooth transition and announced upcoming posts about the truncation process and a new composable data platform.
