# Mercury's Past, Present and Future Over the last two years of working on Mercury the product has changed countless times. Partly due to the fact that Mercury's development accompanied Soroban's as well and there have been lots of breaking changes that we've had to keep up with, but mostly because of an ever-evolving product vision. Among other things, this vision has brought to life two incredibly interesting technologies and approaches to deal with data indexing: zephyr and retroshades. Zephyr was the real breakthrough: a standalone virtual machine to allow developers to safely deploy to the cloud fully customizable data workflows in a vm that had full compatibility with the SVM. Later came retroshades, a simpler but most effective and efficient approach that directly reuses the SVM; simpler to maintain and use. The internals of Mercury changed ***A LOT*** as well, we've added countless features, adapted for different client-specific use cases which brought us a long way from the minimal and lightweight indexer that Mercury was initially set to be. Adding all of this structure on top of the product was beneficial in the beginning it signaled innovation and committment, however it quickly backfired. Really, it's simple math: very small team (w only 1 core dev), centralized and mostly not open-source, lots of (some very complex internally) features, lots of underlying breaking changes (soroban evolves fast), not enough market to start generating revenue; eventually we couldn't keep up with everyting. This caused significant downtime and issues that eventually led every major team working with Mercury to switch to their own provider or other 3rd parties and the product slowly trending towards being sunset. That said, we'd like highlight all of the effort that went into Mercury not getting sunset rather revamped: the stakes are simply too high, Mercury's tech is essentially too good to let go completely and we say this with confidence. And it's not just the tech, it's mostly about the idea of not wanting to stop innovating on the network-data front rather than conforming to whatever standards other ecosystems have been established with. As a result, we've been learning from everything we did wrong (and right) to come up with a whole new product vision that is: - sustainable long-term - stable and reliable - revenue-centered - research-focused ## The New Mercury & The Future We've trimmed down the codebase explicitly focusing **only on soroban**, removed non-essential features, open-sourced the whole stack, and improved our devops infrastructure. The end result is a minimal version of Mercury: 1. Minimal UI on the app (mostly to manage access-control). 2. No subscriptions. 5. No more Zephyr. This was a though one, but we can't justify the ZVMs need for extensive maintenance for every breaking soroban upgrade. The whole zephyr stack is however public, allowing anyone to continue it if needed. 6. Soroban-only APIs: a. All contract events always available. b. All soroban transactions always available. c. Retroshades is the only VM running on our servers. d. Ask for any raw current state in the ledger. 7. Ledger meta ws endpoint for self-hosted executor instances (zephyr and retroshades instances can plug into Mercury as data source for their metas). Current work that is undergoing development is further improving realiablity and liveness with clustered deployments and improved APIs for contract and tx retrievals to make the indexing much more efficient. We've also [researching](https://heytdep.github.io/post/38/post.html) and [implementing](https://heytdep.github.io/post/39/post.html) trustless execution technologies applied to Stellar leveraging our infrastructure and tooling which unlocks several use-cases; this is the future and the direction we're following for continuing our journey in reasoning outside of the box for data workflows. There is already some interesting work that is starting under the hood in relation to this, reach out to us (see below) if you want to learn more. # Reach Out To Us We're opening comms for a select number of teams that are building on Soroban and are looking to demo-access the best indexer in the market. Reach out on telegram to `heytdep` to know more.