Indicio is committed as a company to participating in and supporting the open source community, which is why we are excited to announce that Daniel Bluhm, our engineering team lead, is running for co-chair of the Decentralized Identity Foundation (DIF) Interoperability Group.

By Tim Spring

Daniel is an engineering team lead at Indicio and has been an active contributor to the decentralized identity space for over three years, as a maintainer of multiple projects in Hyperledger Aries and a contributor to Hyperledger Indy. 

One claim to fame is that he  was  one of the original members of the  Hyperledger Indy Agent Working Group and continued contributing to it as it grew and into the Hyperledger Aries project. 

In addition to contributing code to DIF, he is also the original author of the DIDComm-js library that’s been in use for the past few years. One last feather in his cap we will mention —although there are many more — is that he was the lead engineer on the Indy DID Method implementation effort, which represents a critical step forward in Hyperledger Indy interoperability.  

One of the most interesting challenges for Daniel is finding ways that allow multiple different technologies  to interact and work together at the same time – which is exactly what the team working on Hyperledger Aries has been striving for. For example, Aries agents have agent-to-agent communication taking place over DIDComm protocols, which enables implementations from different vendors and communities to interact. To enable the full verifiable credential/decentralized identity ecosystem, we also need ledger-to-agent communication in addition to agent-to-agent communication. As the community continues to build, Daniel is excited to shift his focus to more interoperability with ledgers outside of the Hyperledger ecosystem, such as Cheqd, Ion, EBSI, etc.

Being an experienced contributor to Aries and DIDComm, Daniel is well equipped to help represent that community in interoperability discussions and he looks forward to the opportunity:

“I am passionate about interoperability and believe it is key to adoption of decentralized identity and, by extension, a future where everyone’s privacy is better protected online. I look forward to getting more involved at the DIF! :)” —Daniel Bluhm

You can read about all the candidates and cast your vote here.

For a deeper look into some of the work Daniel has been doing, and some of the advice he offers to developers just getting started, we encourage you to take a look at his recent Hyperledger Developer Showcase. 

You can also learn more about his work with DID:Indy and see him present a demonstration of how this will further interoperability between Indy networks here.

See the technical workings of the DID:Indy Method on GitHub