Summary

Owned by Robert Mitwicki
Sept 09, 2020
3 min read

Thanks to all who participated in the Indy Interop-athon 2020 on Sept. 1st and 2nd. As I mentioned in the opening session, it was a much bigger event than we had expected and we were delighted in the level of participation and engagement during the conference. By the numbers, we had 109 individual participants, with 100 showing up on day 1, 95 on day 2 and together we spent over 19,000 participant minutes in Zoom rooms. For those who want to listen (or relisten) to the sessions, the recordings and notes are all available on the conference agenda page here: Agenda - Indy Interop-athon - Hyperledger Confluence.

A special thanks to Evernym and the Sovrin Foundation for covering the cost of the conference platform. Happily the cost was lower than expected and QIQOChat proved (again) to be a great platform. And by the way, the mystery of the missing “Join Zoom” buttons has been solved! Live and learn...

Did we accomplish the goal of the conference? That will be determined in the next few months of design and development leading (we hope!) to Aries agents seamlessly interoperating across Indy networks. Regardless, I definitely think we made some great progress during the two days of the conference. Here is my summary of the decisions we made:

  • A new “did:indy” DID Method Specification will be developed that will use namespaced identifiers, such as “did:indy:findy:123456”, where the 3rd element is a network identifier.

  • The new DID Method will include mechanisms for generating DIDs as identifiers for other ledger objects used with Verifiable Credentials, such as schemas and revocation registries.

  • We will use configuration information in resolving DIDs to find their network genesis files and hence, the network nodes. 

  • We’ll use the existing ATTRIB transactions to store full DIDDocs for DIDs. Ideally, we’ll add special handling of ATTRIBs in indy-node to verify DIDDocs before writing.

  • indy-node will be enhanced to natively return previous versions of DID-related data (e.g. verkeys and DIDDocs).

  • Qualified identifiers (including network information) for ledger objects will be used everywhere off the ledger. In making that change, care will be taken in the storage of the identifiers for objects on the ledger to handle future events, such as ledger forks.

  • Indy client/agent code (such as in the indy-sdk and indy-vdr repos) will be enhanced as needed to use qualified identifiers, and to resolve those identifiers to their source ledger.

  • Aries frameworks will be adjusted to support the resolving of DIDs to multiple ledgers as those identifiers are encountered.

  • Work will be carried out to modernize the Indy repositories' CI/CD systems. The current processes are SO 2017!


The ultimate success in achieving our user story is now dependent on organizations and people (you!) stepping up and making contributions. The code is not going to write itself. An important announcement made at the conference was about dHIDA -- the Decentralized Hyperledger Identity Development Alliance moral commitment to provide development resources to the Indy, Aries and Ursa projects. If you missed that session, please watch the first part of this session recording, review the document and if reasonable, make a commitment!

There were also a number of important and informative secondary track sessions. I’ve been going through some that I missed and I highly recommend you do the same. Great content! There are a number of key initiatives that have longer timelines than our primary objective, and that will evolve in parallel.

The best way to follow the progress of our "Next Steps" is to join in and help out. Please reply to this email with any questions about contributing. We’ll be convening a small team to start immediately on the new “did:indy” DID Method, starting from this HackMD document created by Kyle Den Hartog. From there, join the upcoming Indy Contributors calls starting Tuesday September 15 at 5PM CET/11AM Eastern, to learn more about what we are doing and how you can help.

I’d like to add a thank you to all that presented, facilitated, hosted and documented the sessions. It was a great team effort and much appreciated. 

If you have any feedback on the Indy Interop-athon, any questions about Indy, the event or how you can contribute, or requests about the materials, please reply to this email.