Title (Ex. 0000: RFC Topic)

• Author: (your name and/or email)
• Start Date: (fill me in with today's date, YYYY-MM-DD)

Status

• Status: PROPOSED
• Status Date: (date of first submission or last status change)
• Status Note: (explanation of current status; if adopted, links to impls or derivative ideas; if superseded, link to replacement)

Summary

One paragraph explanation of the feature.

Motivation

Why are we doing this? What use cases does it support? What is the expected outcome?

Tutorial

Explain the proposal as if it were already implemented and you were teaching it to another Aries contributor or Aries consumer. That generally means:

• Introducing new named concepts.
• Explaining the feature largely in terms of examples.
• Explaining how Aries contributors and/or consumers should think about the feature, and how it should impact the way they use the ecosystem.
• If applicable, provide sample error messages, deprecation warnings, or migration guidance.

Some enhancement proposals may be more aimed at contributors (e.g. for consensus internals); others may be more aimed at consumers.

Reference

Provide guidance for implementers, procedures to inform testing, interface definitions, formal function prototypes, error codes, diagrams, and other technical details that might be looked up. Strive to guarantee that:

• Interactions with other features are clear.
• Implementation trajectory is well defined.
• Corner cases are dissected by example.

Drawbacks

Why should we not do this?

Rationale and alternatives

• Why is this design the best in the space of possible designs?
• What other designs have been considered and what is the rationale for not choosing them?
• What is the impact of not doing this?

Prior art

Discuss prior art, both the good and the bad, in relation to this proposal. A few examples of what this can include are:

• Does this feature exist in other SSI ecosystems and what experience have their community had?
• For other teams: What lessons can we learn from other attempts?
• Papers: Are there any published papers or great posts that discuss this? If you have some relevant papers to refer to, this can serve as a more detailed theoretical background.

This section is intended to encourage you as an author to think about the lessons from other implementers, provide readers of your proposal with a fuller picture. If there is no prior art, that is fine - your ideas are interesting to us whether they are brand new or if they are an adaptation from other communities.

Note that while precedent set by other communities is some motivation, it does not on its own motivate an enhancement proposal here. Please also take into consideration that Aries sometimes intentionally diverges from common identity features.

Unresolved questions

• What parts of the design do you expect to resolve through the enhancement proposal process before this gets merged?
• What parts of the design do you expect to resolve through the implementation of this feature before stabilization?
• What related issues do you consider out of scope for this proposal that could be addressed in the future independently of the solution that comes out of this doc?