2020 Q1 Hyperledger Indy

Created by Lynn Bendixsen, last modified by Christopher Ferris on Feb 13, 2020

Projects

Distributed Ledger
Client Tool
Shared Components

Project Health

Indy is a healthy project. Indy’s codebase has 25886 commits from 182 unique contributors. This represents an increase of 5 contributors this quarter and about 1900 additional commits. Forums and chat channels are monitored and a variety of participants are contributing helpful responses to questions.

Questions/Issues for the TSC

We continue to track some of the same issues as in previous quarters .

Measuring the size and make-up of our user community

Update:

We didn’t move forward with this effort in the past quarter.

Future work planned:

  • Work with Hyperledger to get analytics about web sites, and Rocket Chat usage. 
  • Begin measuring usage of the Sovrin forums: new contributors, questions asked, and questions answered
  • We will also explore the use of Github’s contributor tool. 

Build Issues

Update:

The volunteers who were working on migrating the build from Jenkins to GitLab CI were not able to complete a functional system. The build is complex due to the variety of target environments for LibIndy and the requirement of running an Indy Node pool for testing. The approach taken in Jenkins is significantly different than the approach favored by GitLab CI or Azure Pipelines, and migration will require significant effort.

Future work planned:

  • We need a new commitment from the various teams who have expressed interest.

Diversity of Contributor Community

Update:

As agent implementers have moved to the Aries project, Indy was left with few contributors to the ledger who all primarily come from a single organization. The health of the project requires broadening this list.

Future work planned:

  • Current initiatives are being led by different organizations, which we hope will become consistent contributors in the future.

Releases

November 2019:

Indy Node 1.11.0
  • Switch to PBFT View Change protocol
  • Stability fixes
Indy Node 1.12.0
  • Improve primary selection algorithm
  • Take into account transaction history when recovering state for new nodes
  • Fix new nodes adding when there are old AUTH_RULE or plugin transactions

December 2019:

Indy SDK 1.13.0

  • LibVCX Aries support:

    • Implemented Connection RFC (IS-1180)
  • Implemented Credential Issuance RFC (IS-1393)
  • Implemented Credential Presentation RFC (IS-1394)

  • Integrated Connection Protocol into Dummy Cloud Agent (IS-1392)

  • Added “names” parameter to Proof Request Revealed Attributes (IS-1381)

  • Bugfixes:

    • Fixed bool representation in Java wrapper (IS-1368)
Indy SDK 1.14.0 /1.14.1

  • LibVCX Aries support:

  • Transaction author agreement changes (IS-1427):

    • Extended the definition of indy_build_txn_author_agreement_request function to accept new parameters:
  • Added a new function indy_build_disable_all_txn_author_agreements_request to disable all Transaction Author Agreement on the ledger.

  • new Indy-CLI commands

  • Bugfixes
Indy Node 1.12.1
  • Multiple active TAAs implementation
  • Stability fixes

January 2020:   

Indy SDK 1.14.2

  • LibVCX Aries support:

    • Implemented Basic Message RFC (IS-1189)

  • Indy-CLI changes:

    • Added new command pool set-protocol-version to set a protocol version that will be used for ledger requests (IS-1391).

  • Added new command payment-address new that does exactly the same work as the existing payment-address create command. The new command was added to match the naming of did new command. The payment-address create command will be removed in future releases (IS-1415).

  • Bugfixes
Indy Node 1.12.2
  • Stability fixes

Overall Activity in the Past Quarter

In the past quarter, ledger development has focused on refactoring the most complicated parts of the system. This has included a lot of bug fixing, automated testing, documentation, and polish. Work on the client libraries has been focused on adding support for the new Aries protocols and planning the evolution to fit into the proposed Aries architecture. This has also included a lot of bug fixing, documentation, and polish. Indy Rocket-chat channels have daily activity where questions are posed and answers are regularly given. 

Current Plans

Ledger development is currently focused on adding support for Verifiable Credentials as defined by the W3C working group, which we are calling “Rich Schemas”. Our focus for client libraries is to break LibIndy into separate components that can be evolved to fit the proposed Aries architecture. By the end of the quarter, we would also like to be working on improved revocation.

Maintainer Diversity

The weekly Indy Maintainers call continues to be the medium by which maintainers coordinate work, discuss critical issues to the Indy codebase, and agree on HIPEs. The Maintainers who work exclusively on Indy is decreasing as many of them move on to help with the Hyperledger Aries project.

Contributor Diversity

Evernym is still the primary contributor to ledger development, but the Rich Schemas effort has been led by the team at the Sovrin Foundation, and the team at British Columbia Government is leading the effort to evolve LibIndy. Smaller contributions have been made by representatives from Kiva, Absa, IBM, Deutsche Telekom, and four independent contributors.

Additional Information

Reviewed by

  • 🔲Angelo De Caro
  • ✅Arnaud J Le Hors
  • ✅Christopher Ferris
  • ✅Dan Middleton
  • 🔲Gari Singh
  • ✅Hart Montgomery
  • ✅Mark Wagner
  • ✅Nathan George
  • ✅Swetha Repakula
  • ✅Tracy Kuhrt
  • ✅Troy Ronda