This specification describes how the payload of each message in the Status Protocol looks like. It does not care how the payload is encrypted or exchanged later.
The payload must be flexible enough to support messaging but also cases described in [Status Whitepaper](https://status.im/whitepaper.pdf) as well as various clients created using vastly different technologies.
If a signature is not present but an author is provided by a layer below, the message is to be relayed to third parties and its considered plausibly deniable.
The payload is encoded using [Transit format](https://github.com/cognitect/transit-format). It is a text-based format so even encoded version is easily readable by humans. Transit was chosen over JSON in order to reduce the bandwidth.
As you can see, the message is an array and each index value has its meaning:
* 0: `c4` is a decoder handler identification for the current payload format. Identifications allow to register handlers for many different types of payload
* 1: array which items correspond to the described payload fields above
For more details regarding serialization and deserialization please consult [transit format](https://github.com/cognitect/transit-format) specification.
Message types are required to decide how a particular message is encrypted (more in [Whisper > Message encryption](#message-encryption)) and what metadata needs to be attached (more in [Whisper > Topic](#topic)) when passing a message to the transport layer.
`timestamp` MUST be Unix time calculated when the message is created. Because the peers in the Whisper network should have synchronized time, `timestamp` values should be fairly accurate among all Whisper network participants.
`clock` SHOULD be calculated using the algorithm of [Lamport timestamps](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamport_timestamps). When there are messages available in a chat, `clock`'s value is calculated based on the last received message in a particular chat: `last-message-clock-value + 1`. If there are no messages, `clock` is initialized with `timestamp`'s value.
`clock` value is used for the message ordering. Due to the used algorithm and distributed nature of the system, we achieve casual ordering which might produce counterintuitive results in some edge cases. For example, when one joins a public chat and sends a message before receiving the exist messages, their message `clock` value might be lower and the message will end up in the past when the historical messages are fetched.
The current protocol format is hardly upgradable without breaking backward compatibility. Because Transit is used in this particular way described above, the only reliable option is to append a new field to the Transit record definition. It will be simply ignored by the old clients.
