Registry Notary retirement decision

Registry Stack decided on 2026-08-03 to retire Registry Notary. At that time, the decision directed adopters to Registry Relay and Registry Evidence. The Relay guidance on this page is historical; Registry Relay was later retired.

Decision

Date: 2026-08-03

Status: Accepted

Retire Registry Notary from the current product surface, source workspace, release train, and continuous integration gates. Keep Registry Relay as the protected read product and Registry Evidence as the minimum-disclosure assertion product. Registry Mint remains a supporting token issuer for deployments without an identity provider.

The decision presented two paths at the time:

• The Registry Relay path covered specific, authorized data reads.
• The Registry Evidence path covered learning only a fact.

Registry Evidence owns its source access independently of Registry Relay. It is not a Notary mode or a continuation of the Notary credential lifecycle.

Context

Registry Notary combined claim evaluation, credential issuance, disclosure policy, replay handling, and audit provenance. Registry Evidence defines a smaller, stateless assertion boundary with its own frozen Version 1 contracts. Keeping both products on the current surface would give adopters overlapping entry points while preserving two different product models.

The retirement narrows the supported surface without changing Registry Relay’s role or Registry Evidence’s name, contracts, or independence.

Consequences

• Completing the retirement removes Registry Notary from workspace components, new release manifests, continuous integration gates, and current product documentation.
• Registry Relay and Registry Evidence remain separate products with separate runtime and configuration boundaries.
• Registry Evidence Version 1 wire identifiers and production behavior remain unchanged.
• Historical changelogs, decision records, release manifests, and archived documentation retain Registry Notary references.
• Publishing this decision redirects current Notary documentation URLs to the corresponding Registry Evidence guidance or to this decision record.
• Archiving retired Notary source and product material is deferred to a separate decision.

Superseded by

The Registry Relay retirement decision supersedes this record’s Relay adoption path. Registry Evidence remains a current product.