Methodology
How AnchorWatch measures the operational health of Stellar anchors — and what each number on the status page means.
Probe cadence
Every registered anchor is probed every 5 minutes, around the clock. Each run measures three protocol surfaces independently and stores the outcome as an immutable time series.
What each probe measures
SEP-1 — stellar.toml
Fetches https://{home_domain}/.well-known/stellar.toml, parses it and records the declared SEP endpoints and currencies. This file is the anchor's public declaration of its services; every other probe depends on it.
SEP-10 — authentication
Requests an authentication challenge from the anchor's declared WEB_AUTH_ENDPOINT and validates its shape (HTTP 200 with a transaction field). It measures whether the anchor's auth gateway is alive and how fast it answers.
SEP-38 — indicative quotes
Requests indicative prices from the anchor's declared ANCHOR_QUOTE_SERVER without authentication and stores one quote per returned asset, building a historical price series.
Status semantics
- Operational
- The flow completed as the protocol specifies.
- Failing
- The endpoint answered, but incorrectly — an HTTP error, an invalid file or a malformed response.
- Unreachable
- The endpoint could not be reached: DNS failure, connection refused or timeout.
- Skipped
- A precondition was missing — most often the anchor simply does not declare that service. Skipped results never count against an anchor.
Two policy gates are recorded as healthy capability notes, not outages: a SEP-38 server answering 401/403 (quotes require authentication) and a SEP-10 endpoint requiring a registered client_domain (challenges restricted to known wallets).
How uptime is calculated
Uptime is the share of successful results among measured results (success, failure and error) in the period. Skipped results are excluded, so anchors are never penalized for services they do not offer. The history strip aggregates one cell per day.
How latency is measured
Wall-clock time of the full HTTP request against the anchor's endpoint, measured by our probes with tight timeouts (5s to connect, 10s to read). Averages exclude probes that produced no response.
Current limitations
- The SEP-10 probe validates the challenge's shape; it does not yet sign it. A signed end-to-end auth check is planned.
- SEP-38 prices are indicative, unauthenticated quotes — firm quotes may differ.
- No real-money synthetic transactions yet: deposit and withdrawal settlement times are not measured in this layer.
Adding or fixing an anchor
Anchors are added when their home domain serves a valid stellar.toml with SEP endpoints, verified against the official anchor directory. Spotted an error or want your anchor listed? Open an issue on the project repository.