Continuity
If this instance disappears
Infrastructure that a whole ecosystem might depend on should not depend on one person staying available. This page is the answer to that question, stated as things you can check rather than promises: what would be lost, what would not, and how to take over without asking anyone.
01 · The chain is the source of truth
Cachet is an interpretation layer over public chain data. Every asset, supply, issuer and event it shows is folded from blocks anyone can read, so the database is a cache: deleting it costs about a minute of resyncing, not a single fact. There is no ownership table, no private ledger, and nothing that exists only because this server says so.
02 · Run it yourself
The whole thing is MIT licensed - console, indexer, API, browser mint engine and the metadata specification. Self-hosting is the documented path, not an afterthought: the deploy script is the same file this deployment runs, and it points at nobody's machine by default.
git clone https://github.com/cachet-zec/cachet && cd cachet docker compose -f infra/docker-compose.yml up -d # chain + Postgres pnpm install && pnpm dev # console + API
A fork is not a degraded copy. It indexes the same chain, verifies the same commitments, and signs its own snapshots under its own key.
03 · Mirror it, and check the mirror
The registry exports itself as a deterministic snapshot - sorted, timestamp-free, so the same chain state always produces byte-identical bytes - sealed with an Ed25519 signature. A mirroring script ships in the repository. It uses only the Python standard library, re-derives the hash of every bundle it downloads, and exits non-zero if anything fails to verify.
python scripts/mirror.py # mirror this registry python scripts/mirror.py --api https://your.instance --out ./mirror
A snapshot signed by any other key is not this registry, whatever a mirror claims. The key is also printed in the working paper, which is the durable anchor: verifying a mirror should never require trusting the mirror.
04 · What would actually be lost
Three tables cannot be rebuilt from the chain, and saying so is more useful than claiming nothing would be lost:
- metadata_bundles - the descriptions and images minters sealed. The chain commits to their hash, never their bytes.
- asset_descriptions - the resolution journal. Re-derivable by anyone who knows a description, since resolution is permissionless and verified against the chain.
- moderation_hidden - what this operator chose to withhold. A mirror that disagrees simply does not have it.
What that costs is availability, never integrity: a bundle is verified against its on-chain hash in the reader's browser, so the store can be lost, mirrored or replaced - but never forged. Anyone holding a mirror holds those bytes too, which is the point of publishing the mirroring script rather than describing it.
05 · What was never here
Most continuity risk comes from what a service holds hostage. Cachet holds nothing: no accounts, no custody at any phase, no allowlist, no ownership database, and no key that only the operator has. Assets are minted in the browser under the minter's own key, so nobody needs this instance to keep controlling what they issued - and the public node accepts transactions directly.
The honest remainder: this deployment's domain and its signing key belong to its operator. A successor cannot inherit them, and should not - they would publish their own key and let readers anchor it, exactly as this one does.