Upgrade your Ceramic node to v5.3+ before the 6th of May

As part of our ongoing commitment to reliability, scalability, and performance, the Ceramic core developers have spent a lot of the last year making significant architectural improvements to our Ceramic Anchor Service (CAS). To further advance the goal of a reliable and performant anchoring system, the CAS is moving away from IPFS. This change requires developers to upgrade their Ceramic nodes to v5.3+ by 6th of May, 2024 to avoid potential data loss.

About the change

The Ceramic team is getting closer to releasing Ceramic’s Recon protocol, intended to dramatically improve the performance, scalability, and reliability of cross-node data synchronization. Utilizing our new custom Recon protocol requires moving away from IPFS pubsub as the mechanism for synchronizing Streams in Ceramic. In preparation for this change, the Ceramic team has built a new direct HTTP-based mechanism for sharing Time Events from the CAS to Ceramic nodes. This means that newer Ceramic nodes no longer have any dependency on IPFS pubsub to learn about Time Events from the CAS. Older Ceramic nodes, however, may still be relying on pubsub to learn about Time Events. Since the correct delivery of Time Events is a requirement to avoid data loss, it is important that all Ceramic nodes on the network be upgraded to at least v5.3 by the 6th of May, 2024, to avoid potential data loss.

What does this mean to Ceramic developers?

Developers must upgrade their Ceramic nodes to v5.3+ by the 6th of May, 2024. After the 6th of May, the CAS will no longer publish Time Events to IPFS pubsub which means that if you don’t upgrade to v5.3+, your node won’t get notifications about anchor successes, which in turn may result in data loss.

How to get support?

If you need support regarding the upgrade or choosing the best path forward for your project, please create a post on Ceramic developer forum with your project details and the core Ceramic team members will reach out to you.