Registry Notary retirement decision

Registry Stack decided on 2026-08-03 to retire Registry Notary and direct current adopters to Registry Relay and Evidence Gateway.

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 Evidence Gateway as the minimum-disclosure assertion product. Registry Mint remains a supporting token issuer for deployments without an identity provider.

Present two paths to adopters:

• Use Registry Relay when another system must read specific, authorized data.
• Use Evidence Gateway when another system must learn only a fact.

Evidence Gateway 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. Evidence Gateway 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 Evidence Gateway’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 Evidence Gateway remain separate products with separate runtime and configuration boundaries.
• Evidence Gateway 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 Evidence Gateway guidance or to this decision record.
• Archiving retired Notary source and product material is deferred to a separate decision.

Superseded by

None.