2023 Q4 Hyperledger Indy

Created by Stephen Curran and the Hyperledger Indy Maintainers.

Sub-Projects

Distributed Ledger

Client Tools

Specifications

Project Health

The project continued to have little maintainer activity, with most of the updates focused on the work necessary to deprecate the Indy SDK in favour of the more modern indy-vdr and indy-shared-rs (which will soon be replaced by Hyperledger AnonCreds). Indy will retain the indy-node ledger implementation (with the underlying indy-plenum consensus code), and indy-vdr client code to access the ledger. The other parts of the Indy SDK will be elsewhere, secure storage in Aries Askar and Hyperledger AnonCreds for verifiable credential exchange.

The highlight of the quarter was the Second Indy Ecosystem Summit held in early September – a follow up to the First Indy Ecosystem Summit that was discussed in the last quarterly report. The event was again well attended, 40+ participants, and the topics covered included specific actions for moving the project forward. Here is a link to the materials from both summits. See the Overall Activity for more details of the discussions.

Per the Indy Quarterly Activity Dashboard, there were 149 commits (up about 50% from last quarter) from 11 contributors (down about 50% from last quarter).

Questions/Issues for the TOC

See the idea in that came out of the Second Hyperledger Indy Ecosystem Summit:

Is there a way for the Hyperledger Foundation to enable a group to collect funds for an open source objective, and the use those funds to enable a code contribution?

Issues from previous reports

Diversity of Contributor Community

See the updated type of information in the appropriate section of this report.

Releases

  • indy-vdr - - v0.4.0-dev.13 to v0.4.0-dev.16
  • indy-node-container - v1.2.5
  • indy-shared-rs - v0.3.3

Overall Activity in the Past Quarter

GitHub activity was focused on the so-called Shared Components (indy-vdr, indy-shared-rs and [aries-askar]) and the transition away from the Indy SDK. The maintainer community has discussed the formal deprecation of the Indy SDK and the Aries maintainers have been busy making the Shared Components the default in Aries, in preparation for the deprecation announcement.

At the Second Indy Ecosystem Summit, two discussions focused on paths forward. On the technical side, DSR Corporation presented several ideas for evolving the Indy Node ledger component, including evolving the current implementation, or implementing Indy transactions on another network, such as Hyperledger Besu, or Cosmos. While there is no pressing feature set needed in the foreseeable future, the lack of maintainers on the existing code base is concerning. Those with an opinion thought that Besu was the most interesting alternative and work has started on defining what that might mean. This breaks into a couple of questions:

  • How to write Indy (or more accurately, AnonCreds) objects on a Besu network (schema, credential definitions, and revocation registries)?
  • Can and should the existing Indy roles be used when running on a Besu network?
  • Can and should the existing Indy authorization rules be used when running on a Besu network?

The second topic raised was if and how the Indy community, as represented at the Ecosystems Summits, can collaborate on moving the Indy technology, marketing and regulatory environment forward? For example, is there a way for the Hyperledger Foundation to enable a group to collect funds for an open source objective, and then use those funds to enable a code contribution?

Current Plans

Continuing the move of the Aries Frameworks to indy-vdr and [aries-askar] and away from indy-sdk, which will enable its deprecation. The high priority work on Hyperledger AnonCreds implementation will also drive that effort.

Investigating different paths forward for Hyperledger Indy ledger components, including a specific look at the use of Hyperledger Besu for that purpose. What would that look like as a technical component?

A third Hyperledger Indy Ecosystem Summit is planned, but not yet scheduled, likely with a more focused group – those that are operating Indy networks.

Maintainer Diversity

There are 35 individuals on 22 Indy GitHub Teams representing at least 16 organizations.

Still needed – a cleanup of the teams are needed as some of the individuals are no longer active in the community. No progress was made on that cleanup this quarter. We have the team lists, but have not queried those on the list to see if they are still interested in being maintainers.

Contributor Diversity

See the Indy Quarterly Activity Dashboard for information about contributors this quarter. The 11 individual contributors came from at least 6 different organizations. Attendees at the Hyperledger Indy Ecosystem Summits were from 30+ organization in 14 countries across 4 continents. Indy continues to be globally relevant.

Additional Information