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The contributors to Hyperledger Indy spent this past quarter working on three these key initiatives:

1. Addressing ledger stability concerns raised during testing and during production outages of client networks.

2. Adding Hardening the ledger and adding ledger monitoring to continue preparation for widespread usage.

3. Maturing agent standards to build ecosystem compatibility.

4. Developing and develop reference agents so that they are usable by new participants in the ecosystem.

5. Documentation improvements to enhance ease of use and encourage new contributors.

These three efforts have yielded significant results.

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• Several stability fixes have been implemented and ledgers are running better than ever.

• Indy’s codebase has surpassed 17,000 commits from 143 unique contributors.

• The Indy team continues to work with other Hyperledger teams to transition from the indy-crypto component to Hyperledger Ursa.An audit ledger was added.

• Graduation from incubation status only requires 3 more action items:

• • An Indy use cases document (a community effort just started with this doc )

  • Confirmation that indy projects implement perfect forward secrecy

  • Automated code coverage collection (

    • This is very difficult considering our tech stack. There is active development on this front and it will hopefully be implemented soon

    )

    • .

Some new and exciting things that are in the works:

• Schema improvements!

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• • We are currently working on enhanced schemas that will be compatible with the W3C Verifiable Credentials standards.

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• •  Our current credentials use schemas that are simple flat lists of untyped strings and this effort will allow complex data structures such as those available from  schema.org .
  • New encoding methods (to convert properties to signature values) and presentation (proof) requests will be able to preserve privacy and security through zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP) while maintaining the cryptographic assurances that the credential values have not been modified. The new encoding methods will expand the number of credential values that can be used in predicate proofs, such as "greater than", "less-than-or-equal", etc.
  • Schema re-use between Verifiable Credential issuers will promote interoperability.
• Audit ledger
  • As we move permission management to the config ledger, we identified the need for an audit ledger to make it easy to verify what permissions were in place with each write.
  • The audit ledger will also ensure deterministic catch up between ledgers which resolves some BFT consensus corner cases.
• SDK improvements
  • The SDK will move from indy-crypto to Ursa.
    
  • LibVCX, the credential exchange library, is available in Indy SDK as an experimental API. We are evolving that API to respond to community feedback.
  • The SDK is being updated to comply with HIPEs documenting interoperability standards.
  • These efforts are likely to require backwards incompatible changes to the API, requiring an Indy SDK 2.0.
• Ledger 2.0
  • We are confident that Indy Node can scale to millions of users, but we have identified a number of problems with the existing implementation that will limit future scalability. Solutions are likely to require fundamental architectural changes.
  • We are recruiting contributors from various organizations to assist in designing the future of the ledger and starting implementation.

Issues

Ensure quality releases for downstream users

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• The Indy team will continue to focus on providing releases that can be immediately deployed downstream.

• The team is being more deliberate about preserving backwards compatibility. (More work is still needed here)

• The “ledger 2.0” design project is under way and includes representatives from many organizations within our community.

Inconsistent documentation

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• In the past quarter we published consolidated documentation to a shared site . sites:  hyperledger-indy.readthedocs.io and doc.sovrin.org .

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• Work with Hyperledger to get analytics about web sites, and Rocket Chat usage.

• Begin measuring usage of the Sovrin forums: new contributors, questions asked, and questions answered

• Measure Indy tags on Stack Overflow.

Build Issues

Progress made:

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• Additional hotfixes for improved stability.

January 2019:   

No new Releasesreleases

Overall Activity in the Past Quarter

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• Significant focus on performance and stability.

• Continued research into a future ledger architecture.

Indy SDK

• Release of experimental LibVCX.

• Started work to support HIPEs defining Agent to Agent compatibility.

Indy Agent

• Many HIPEs moved to accepted status.

• Significant iterations on and discussion surrounding several HIPEs.

• Increased collaboration with new contributors in the community.

Current Plans

Additional organizations are making ongoing contributions. This is shown by the shared Running Roadmap for Hyperledger Indy.

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• Incubation status graduation.

• Complete the three items mentioned earlier in this document and apply for graduation.

• Continue to refine documentation.

• Consolidate documentation for onboarding contributors.

• Network stability of the first production deployment (Sovrin).

Indy Node

• Consume official builds of Hyperledger Ursa (the shared crypto-lib), as they are approved.

• Further improvements to automated testing.

• Research into Ledger 2.0

• Improve the stability and performance of View Change, Catch-up, and Replication

• Establish a cache for reads, such as observer nodes

• Broader OS support.

Indy SDK

• Agent to Agent compatibility.

• Consume official builds of Hyperledger Ursa (the shared crypto-lib), as they are approved.

• Broader OS support.

Indy Agent

• Standardizing agent-to-agent protocol through agent test suite.

• Tests associated with each major aspect of the protocol.

• Multiple interoperable agents in the community.

• Addition of a reference cloud agent.Contributing a reference mobile agent to the Sovrin Foundation.

Maintainer Diversity

Indy maintainers remain active in developing and contributing to working group calls and public discussions. The bi-weekly Indy Maintainers Circle call has consistently been the medium by which maintainers coordinate work, discuss critical issues to the Indy codebase, and resolve HIPEs. The Indy Agent call continues to be the focus of much attention, and the Overlays Working Group also continues to receive a lot of interest .

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