Proposed new protocol names

[Lydia Wagner]

Hi all,

I’m a Technical Program Manager for the Partner Engineering (formerly Integrations) team at SDF, and for the past few months I’ve been leading an internal review of some of our protocol titles. This effort was spurred by watching teammates and partners onboard and realizing that we were defaulting to the SEP namespace, which has no meaning unto itself and can be confusing for newcomers, instead of plain language names.

We’d like to propose names that we feel are more usable and clear. As an added bonus, the work of defining each protocol in plain language also led us to consider other ways we can improve them (e.g. parity across the depth of documentation for servers and clients, SEP versioning, and SEP process documentation), so look for those updates in the next few months as well.

Here are the PRs for the new names; each has a context section and then a section where I explain why the name was chosen and what alternatives were considered. We’d love to get feedback from the Stellar community on these proposed titles, so please review and comment on the PRs and/or feel free to discuss here.

SEP-1
Current: stellar.toml
Proposed: Stellar Info File
https://github.com/stellar/stellar-protocol/pull/919

SEP-6
Current: Anchor/Client interoperability
Proposed: Deposit and Withdrawal API
https://github.com/stellar/stellar-protocol/pull/920

SEP-9
Current: Standard KYC / AML fields
Proposed: Standard KYC Fields
https://github.com/stellar/stellar-protocol/pull/921

SEP-10
Current: Stellar Web Authentication
Proposed: Stellar Authentication
https://github.com/stellar/stellar-protocol/pull/922

SEP-12
Current: Anchor/Client customer info transfer
Proposed: KYC API
https://github.com/stellar/stellar-protocol/pull/923

SEP-24
Current: Interactive Anchor/Wallet Asset Transfer Server
Proposed: Hosted Deposit and Withdrawal
https://github.com/stellar/stellar-protocol/pull/924

SEP-31
Current: Direct Payments
Proposed: Cross-border Payments API
https://github.com/stellar/stellar-protocol/pull/925

Best, Lydia

[Leigh McCulloch]

Hi Lydia,

The new names are easier to understand and look like a clear improvement to me. 👏

About SEP-10 specifically, I wonder if we should consider another name. Stellar Authentication sounds accurate to me, but since the term authentication could be used to describe other aspects of the Stellar protocol, such as signing transactions, I wonder if it is not specific enough. Having 'Web' as part of the name helped to set it apart. If we had settled on Stellar Auth that probably would have also helped set it apart, as it would have sounded similar to OAuth. Another name that might focus more on the use case and less on the technology is "Login with Stellar" which describes in reality what SEP-10 is used for. Thoughts?

Leigh