Project Health

Hyperledger Aries continues at a healthy pace, seeing lots of activity in most of the Aries sub-communities, including Aries Framework JavaScript, Aries Bifold (mobile wallet), Aries Cloud Agent Python and Aries VCX. Lots of progress being made on all of those efforts!

While not a risk to the progress being made in the various open source Aries communities, the question of moving some of the Aries projects from the Hyperledger Foundation to the Open Wallet Foundation (OWF) was raised this quarter. A fork of a long dormant Aries project (the .NET Framework) has been created in the OWF. A more interesting situation is the transfer of the actively maintained Aries Framework JavaScript repository from Hyperledger to OWF that has been proposed by some Aries Framework JavaScript maintainers. It’s an interesting topic, and we’ll no doubt see more discussion and action related to Aries and the OWF in coming months.

Questions/Issues for the TOC

None.

Releases

The following Aries releases occurred in the last quarter:

Interoperability status can be seen here: https://aries-interop.info.

Overall Activity in the Past Quarter

Per the Aries Activity Dashboard for the months of July-September 2023, Aries codebases had 402 PRs (up 5%) from 64 contributors (down 9%).

  • There continues to be activity towards completing the integration of Hyperledger AnonCreds into most of the Aries Frameworks to enable ledger-agnostic implementations, with the Aries Framework JavaScript evolving their existing implementation and Aries VCX and Aries Cloud Agent Python working on an initial implementation.
  • The move away from the Indy SDK continues to accelerate. Deprecation announcements have been published, and we would expect support to be dropped by the frameworks as soon as continuing its use adds complexity to a feature.
  • The Government of British Columbia launched a “Code With Us” open source procurement for an Aries Load Test Generator for stress testing Aries issuers, verifiers, and mobile agent mediators. Indicio PBC was awarded the work, and have prepared the Aries Akrida repository in response to the challenge. The repository is expected to move into the Hyperledger GitHub organization soon.

Aries Framework Reports

Aries VCX

Accomplishments

  • Finished migration from legacy indysdk components to maintained components indy-vdr and credx
  • Ongoing efforts to add support for V2 versions of issue-credential and presentation protocols to enable wider varieties of VC formats.
  • Big portion of dev effort was dedicated to refactoring, improving developer experience, making tests cleaner, stabler and more efficient.
  • The two ongoing mentorship projects shaping up nicely:

2023Q4 Planning

  • Completion and stabilization of V2 issuance/presentation protocols
  • Stabilization of new reusable components created in 2023, such as did, did_document, did_peer, did_exchange and others. On the same note, general improvement of developer onboarding of these components, as they will be adopted also outside of Aries context.
  • Completion of our two 2023 mentorship projects
  • Progress on work to migrate from credx to [anoncreds-rs] to enable implementation of non-indy anoncreds methods

Aries Framework JavaScript

This quarter, Aries Framework JavaScript development was focused on two trends. On one side, making fixes and optimizations for 0.4.x release, following feedback from first adopters of it. Among those, we can highlight expanding support for the DIDComm Out-of-Band connection establishment flows and support for Aries Askar profiles in multi-tenancy scenarios. On the other side, preparing for the next major releases: 0.5.0 (expected for Q4 2023) and 0.6.0 (expected for Q1 2024). Work towards those releases include supporting SD-JWTs, the latest drafts of OpenID4VCs (issuance and presentation) and DIDComm V2, are well underway.

A topic of discussion in the Aries Framework JavaScript community is the possibility of the transfer of the Aries Framework JavaScript repository (and likely some related repositories) from the Hyperledger Foundation to the Open Wallet Foundation that has been proposed by some Aries Framework JavaScript maintainers. The issue is not yet finalized, and discussions are continuing.

Aries Cloud Agent Python

Aries Cloud Agent Python (ACA-Py) work in the quarter included the following highlights:

  • Making some foundational updates to the CI/CD pipeline (upgrading the minimum support Python version, switching to Poetry for package management, and ruff for linting).
  • Adding support for SD-JWTs format verifiable credential – signing and verifying.
  • Work to enable the upcoming transitions from the use of unqualified DIDs, and to DIDComm V2.
  • Adding support for the ledger-agnostic Hyperledger AnonCreds.
  • Maintenance and performance optimizations.
  • Creation of the Aries Cloud Agent Python plugins repository – an “app store” for modular extensions to ACA-Py.

Aries Framework Go

After an active previous quarter, activity slowed this quarter on Aries Framework Go. In checking with the primary maintainers (from Gen Digital) about this change, we were told that the current maintainers will not be continuing to evolve the framework. As such, we’ll consult with the community and either change the maintainers or archive the repository.

Current Plans

Maintainer Diversity

There are currently 62 people on the 48 Hyperledger Aries teams representing at least 19 organizations.

Contributor Diversity

In 2023Q3 there were contributions from 64 individuals representing at least 18 organizations.

Additional Information

None