Hello @everyone! The Ceramic team recognizes the instability, disruption and data loss in the Ceramic anchoring system (CAS) recently. We take this seriously. Because of this, our engineering team has spent the past four months on a major re-architecture of anchoring, designed to yield a significantly more stable system.
From now on, CAS will no longer be running its own Ceramic node to fetch commit data needed to build merkle trees included in anchor commits. Instead, it will just use the tip CIDs provided in anchor requests to fetch the relevant commit data directly from IPFS.
This means that CAS will no longer spend resources to run all of the ceramic node logic when a commit is fetched, which will make it quicker and capable of serving more anchor requests at a time.
The change is up and running starting today (6th of February, 2023). We have tested this in Development and Clay. While we don’t expect any problems, we acknowledge that this is a major re-architecture to the Ceramic Anchoring Service. Please let us know if you notice any unusual behaviour, specifically, errors regarding the anchoring service, including errors about earlier commits anchoring instead of later commits.