2021 Q3 Hyperledger Ursa

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Project:  we have lost some contributors and interest from the Indy ecosystem.  This is mostly because these contributors are happy with the current features that Ursa provides

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We say something like this in pretty much every report, but we want to reiterate that we are always interested in getting in touch with others who want to use cryptography, and particularly so for people that want to use non-standardized crypto like threshold signatures or zero knowledge proofs.  If this describes you, please feel free to get in touch with us.

Maintainer Diversity

Active Maintainers:

Mike Lodder (Independent)
Brent Zundel (Evernym Inc.)
Dave Huseby (Independent)
Hart Montgomery (Fujitsu)
Dan Middleton (Intel)

Current Plans

We have a lot of stuff in the pipeline.  We'll list some things here:

1. Perhaps most notably, we are still doing a large reorganization.  It's been slow.  All of our "fancy" crypto was structured in the form of a library we called zmix, which was originally designed to be an extensible zero knowledge proof system.  However, the people that designed that, while excellent, moved on from Ursa a while ago.  In the meantime, people have used Ursa in different ways than the zmix design originally anticipated.  As such, we are rearchitecting Ursa to better reflect how people are actually using Ursa today.  Mike and Brent, in particular, have done a great job getting this going.  
2. At some point, we should have a zero knowledge library contribution.  The goal would be to enable flexible use of ZK proofs in a way that the underlying proof cryptography can be switched out in a modular manner.

At some point this year, we'll work on adding post-quantum implementations.  The timeline for this depends a bit on NIST though.

In terms of community management, we our discussing with Ry and David B about how to better do community outreach so that we can find more contributors and users.  We recognize that it is hard to find talented cryptographers and cryptographic engineers with time to contribute, but we need to expand our contributor base and so are going to make a concerted effort to do so.

Q4 Report

Q1 2021 2021 Q1 Hyperledger Ursa

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