Project Health

Work on Hyperledger Aries continues at a healthy pace, with lots of activity in all of the Aries and the related-OWF sub-communities. Aries Cloud Agent Python continues to move to its 1.0.0 release, and the community around [Aries-VCX] is again growing, with lots of work happening in moving the implementation forward. Open Wallet Foundation-hosted Credo-TS and [Bifold Wallet] continue to evolve rapidly. Animo Solutions, key maintainers of Credo-TS, were selected by the German Government as a funded participant in the Funke (“sparkle”) initiative to create innovative wallet prototypes in preparation for the promised German EUDI Wallet to be released by 2026. Exciting times!

Questions/Issues for the TOC

None at this time.

Releases

The following Aries releases occurred in the last two quarters (including the time covered by the Annual Report and so not yet reported):

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 April-June 2024, Aries codebases had 3185 Commits and 275 contributors representing at least 28 organizations. The numbers do include the repositories that have moved from Hyperledger to the Open Wallet Foundation, as well as some obsolete (but unchanging) repositories. Per Ry Jones there is not a good way for us to control the included list of repos.

  • The Indy SDK has been removed from ACA-Py, eliminating the older component in favour of newer and more capable replacements (Aries Askar, Indy VDR, and AnonCreds RS). Good to see that transition!
    • NOTE: THIS DOES NOT REMOVE INDY SUPPORT FROM ACA-PY!
  • Support for AnonCreds in W3C VCDM Format in Aries has been implemented in Aries Cloud Agent Python.
  • Work has begun on adding DIDComm v2 support in ACA-Py.

Aries Framework Reports

Aries VCX

Lots of work has been happening on Aries VCX with the release of 0.64.0 and 0.65.0, and it has also gained new maintainers, contributors and support from Instnt.

The releases have included updates to the AATH (Aries Agent Test Harness) Aries VCX Backchannel to include the latest 0.65.0 updates and implement processes for continuous deployment of the backchannel. As part of the efforts updating the backchannel, work has occurred to resolve interoperability issues between Aries VCX and Aries Cloud Agent Python (ACA-Py) within DID Exchange, adding support for DID Exchange 1.1 and did:peer numalgo 4.

Release 0.65.0 marks the planned final release including support for the indy-sdk, credx, and indyvdrtools crates and features in Aries VCX. The replacement for these crates are already implemented (Aries Askar, anoncreds-rs, and indy-vdr) in Aries VCX. Additional info or discussion can be found here. Work is underway to remove these dependencies from the project.

Work is in-progress on fixing and enhancing fixing Android support, as well as adding support for iOS. Support for usage via React Native will be considered in the future as well. Additionally, work is planned and underway to improve the overall ease of use of Aries VCX to boost its adoption.

Aries Cloud Agent Python

Aries Cloud Agent Python (ACA-Py) work in the quarter has focused on the upcoming Release 1.0.0. Almost everything is in place and as this is being written, the last PR for the release is being reviewed. Real Soon Now! Details about the updates and changes in the release can be found about about the release from the ACA-Py Release Candidate changelog.

The maintainers of ACA-Py are in the process of adding a Long Term Support (LTS) policy for the project, modelled on the Hyperledger Fabric LTS approach. We have two LTS versions at this time (0.11.x and 0.12.x). Once stabilized, there will be a 1.x LTS minor release declared as well.

Transitioned the sourcing of the ACA-Py documentation site https://aca-py.org to be from the ACA-Py repo itself.

Current Plans

Maintainer Diversity

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

Contributor Diversity

In the quarter there were commits from 275 individuals representing at least 28 organizations.

Additional Information

None