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. 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.