Hyperledger Project Update
Project
Distributed Ledger
Shared Components
Project Health
Hyperledger Indy has maintained its substantial growth during these summer months. The Indy project has made significant progress toward graduating incubation status, having completed 94% of CII badge requirements. Indy’s codebase has surpassed 10,000 commits from over 100 contributors, and continues to look forward to general availability.
As a part of the progress in indy-sdk and indy-node, Indy’s Q2-2018 was highlighted by significant contributions to Indy Agents—key components to the Indy use-cases. Global developer interest and contribution has also continued; notably, the Amsterdam Hackathon (June) and Indy Agent Workshop (July) both garnered international representation.
Additional organizations are making ongoing contributions. This is shown by the shared Running Roadmap for Hyperledger Indy.
Issues
The rapid growth of the Indy project has resulted in a lack of consistency in some areas. We are currently addressing the following specific concerns:
Meet the needs of a diverse set of contributors
Remediation:
Keeping the shared
roadmap up-to-date
Establishing procedures for multiple teams to hold independent sprints in the Indy project of Hyperledger Jira
Embedding developers from multiple organizations into the same sprint team to meet specific development goals
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Holding coordination calls between maintainers from different organizations (every other Monday)
Ensure quality releases for downstream users
Remediation:
Significant focus on testing Indy Node for scalability and performance, resulting in a lot of bug fixes and refactoring for maintainability
Identified places where the algorithms for view change and catch-up can fail, and scheduled an effort for improving those algorithms
Creating new tools for automated testing (indy-chaos framework)
Inconsistent documentation
The lack of quality documentation remains a significant obstacle for many of those interested in working with Indy
Many contributors have included documentation with their work; however, this documentation sometimes does not match the existing documentation or is not easily found
Remediation:
Established an indy-outreach chat channel to coordinate efforts
Established a HIPE to establish documentation guidelines
Consolidating redundant documentation and reworking it for different user levels
Proof-of-concept implementation for publishing documentation to a shared site (Read The Docs)
Minimize the onboarding burden for both developers and users
Incompatible agent implementations
Remediation:
These agents have been contributed to a common repository where we can create a set of intercompatible reference agents
Brigham Young University hosted an Agent Workshop where the organizations with active agent implementations could meet to discuss design differences and progress to a common protocol
Establishing a canonical test suite to verify that a new agent follows the established communication protocol
Measuring the size and make-up of our user community
Remediation:
Working with Hyperledger to get analytics about GitHub project usage, web sites, Rocket Chat usage
Begin measuring usage of the Sovrin forums: new contributors, questions asked, and questions answered
Releases
June 2018:
Indy SDK 1.5
Payment interface
Pluggable wallet storage
Wallet export / import
Indy Node 1.4
July 2018:
Indy SDK 1.6.0
Indy SDK 1.6.1
Indy Node 1.5
August 2018:
Indy SDK 1.6.2
Indy Node 1.6
Overall Activity in the Past Quarter
General
We are 94% completed with the CII badge
Increased usage of Hyperledger Indy Project Enhancement (HIPE) process
Improved release documentation
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Indy Agent
Came to consensus on key issues in agent protocol
Preliminary connection establishment HIPE (
RFC)
Preliminary transport HIPE
Preliminary message format HIPEs
Test Suite and community rallying behind it as an interoperability tool
Current Plans
General
Proposal for incubation status graduation
Continue to refine documentation
Improve onboarding process for new developers
Identify beginner tasks
Provide examples
Produce more videos
Network stability of the first production deployment (Sovrin)
Indy Node
Improve automated testing
Enhancing scalability by changing transport between client and node
Refactor to increase stability and performance
View change
Catch up
Replication
Standards compliance
DID
DID Document
Credentials
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Observer nodes
Indy SDK
Migrate recently donated libvcx source code into indy-sdk
CI/CD improvements, including a public Jenkins pipeline
Contribute to hyperledger-crypto with assets from indy-crypto
Schema enhancement
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
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 maintainers list has grown to include new Indy Agent contributors. With the addition of two Indy Agent maintainers, we have incorporated new organizations and interest into the maintainers circle. We now also hold regular calls for Indy SDK contributors and Indy Agent contributors to remain aligned on their respective code bases.
Contributor Diversity
Hyperledger Indy continues to see contribution from developers and organizations around the world. Well over 1000 commits were merged into the Indy project from dozens of different contributors over the past three months. The progress in Indy Agent has also aided developers in building applications on top of Indy, which has in turn led to more contribution to the project. The Indy Community Roadmap provides updates on different teams that are working with Indy (currently includes Evernym, BYU OIT, BC.gov, WIPRO, and SecureKey).
POCs, Pilots, Projects
Sovrin DLT
http://www.sovrin.org
Sovrin is the first instantiation of the Indy codebase and is currently in the provisional network phase of development.
Verifiable Organizations Network
https://von.pathfinder.gov.bc.ca
The Province of British Columbia, the Government of Ontario, and Public Services and Procurement Canada are building open components to enable a trusted digital network of verifiable data about organizations which is globally connected, interoperable, secure, and easy to join.
Brigham Young University
https://www.byu.edu/
The University is building an agent to manage student credentials throughout their experience at the university.
Evernym
https://www.evernym.com/
Evernym is creating applications that will make it easy for organizations and users to issue, hold, and verify credentials through the Sovrin network.
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Join the Indy Working Group Calls: every Thursday 8am PT, 9am MT, 11am ET, 4pm BST (Join from PC, Mac, Linux, iOS or Android:
https://zoom.us/j/232861185)