2023 Q1 Hyperledger Indy

Created by Stephen Curran.

Sub-Projects

Distributed Ledger

Client Tools

Specifications

Project Health

A major milestone was hit in the Hyperledger Indy project this quarter. The Indy Node Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipeline to automate the build, testing and publishing of the Indy ledger artifacts was completed. We now have Indy Node release candidates in place based on Ubuntu 20.04, and being used in live Indy instances. The process is fully automated, including the execution of the indy-test-automation tests. Tags in either indy-node or its dependent indy-plenum trigger the full pipeline and artifact publication.

At the end of the quarter, the Indy/Aries community began a push to eliminate the use of the Indy SDK in favor of the so-called shared components, [Indy VDR] (the client ledger interface to Indy networks), indy-shared-rs (an AnonCreds implementation and Indy client utilities) and Aries Askar (secure storage and key management service). BC Gov announced a series of five “Code With Us” opportunities to facilitate this transition, each focused on a transition of the use of the Indy SDK to the shared components. This is a significant transition, as the Indy SDK is difficult to maintain and release, and has some demonstrated performance issues. The shared components address these concerns, by breaking up the Indy SDK into its component parts, each with wrappers and an end-to-end CI/CD pipeline. Apples-to-apples testing of the Indy SDK performance and the shared components performance shows that the shared components are both faster and more stable.

The AnonCreds Rust implementation previously in indy-shared-rs has been moved to the new Hyperledger AnonCreds project and the anoncreds-rs repository. In the shared components migration from the Indy SDK talked about above, the anoncreds-rs AnonCreds implementation will be used. A pair of Indy AnonCreds Methods will remain, one based on the existing Indy AnonCreds objects identifiers, and one based on the new “did:indy” object identifiers. This change will simplify the transition to “did:indy”.

Per the Indy Quarterly Activity Dashboard, there were 100 commits (almost double from last quarter) from 13 contributors (up one).

Questions/Issues for the TSC

Issues from previous reports

Build Pipelines

Update : The Ubuntu upgrade is complete, producing releases and compatibility with the Ubuntu 16.04 instance has been tested. To be removed from the next report.

Diversity of Contributor Community

No Update : Little change this quarter in contributor community. Lots of interest, but core maintainers continue to do most of the work.

Releases

  • indy-node (Ubuntu 20.04) – v1.13.2-rc4

Overall Activity in the Past Quarter

In the past quarter (as in the previous quarter), ledger code development focused on code management – upgrading the Indy Node and Plenum CI/CD pipeline and upgrading Indy Node to run on Ubuntu 20.04. A particular focus was on the indy-test-automation pipeline, and enabling its use for both Indy Node releases and for the downstream Sovrin Node releases.

Much activity occurred in extracting the AnonCreds Rust implementation from the indy-shared-rs repository to the standalone anoncreds-rs repository.

Current Plans

With the new CI/CD Indy Node and Plenum pipelines complete, and the Ubuntu 20.04 indy-node upgrade available, the core maintainers are focused on their downstream releases.

The Aries Frameworks are moving to indy-vdr and [aries-askar] and away from indy-sdk. As that happens, adjustments and additions will be made to the newer repositories. The high priority work on Hyperledger AnonCreds implementation will also drive that effort.

A focus on pushing the “did:indy” DID Method is enabled by the upgrade of Indy Node to the new Ubuntu 20.04-based releases.

Maintainer Diversity

No change the Maintainers this quarter.

Contributor Diversity

See the Indy Quarterly Activity Dashboard for information about contributors this quarter.

Additional Information