payload
Definition
The term 'payload' is used to distinguish between the 'interesting' information in a chunk of data or similar and the overhead to support it. The payload refers to the interesting part.
Origin
It is borrowed from transportation, where it refers to the part of the load that 'pays': for example, a tanker truck may carry 20 tons of oil, but the fully loaded vehicle weighs much more than that - there's the vehicle itself, the driver, fuel, the tank, etc. It costs money to move all these, but the customer only cares about (and pays for) the oil, hence, 'pay-load'. Source.
KERI context
Now payload in KERI. The payload of an item in an Event Log is one the following cryptographic building blocks in KERI:
- a content digest hash
- a root hash of a Merkle-tree
- a public key
Note tha KERI never puts raw data or privacy-sensitive data in a
KELorKERL.