Indicio will upgrade Hyperledger Indy’s SDK thanks to a Code With Us challenge; plus the first ever Bifold Summit.
By Helen Garneau
2023 has started with a bang in the Hyperledger identity community as the open-source Hyperledger Indy and Hyperledger Aries projects are the focus of new development goals sponsored by the government of British Columbia in Canada.
BC Gov is one of the leading developers of open-source decentralized identity technology, and one of the tools it uses to do this quickly and effectively is through its “Code With Us” challenge, a procurement mechanism for public sector organizations to pay developers to code.
Thanks to winning one of the latest challenges, Indicio will upgrade the Hyperledger Indy SDK in all Hyperledger Indy and Aries software. This includes updating all BC Gov Aries Cloud Agent Python (ACA-Py) installations still using the Indy SDK to use Aries Askar.
Aries Askar is an open-source project in the Hyperledger Foundation providing secure storage and cryptographic operations for Aries agent wallets. It is written in the Rust programming language and allows the creation and deletion of wallets, cryptographic key management, and generic record management. Aries Askar’s wallet implementation assists in various decentralized identity interactions such as establishing connections, DIDComm messaging, and receiving and presenting credentials. To enable all this, Indicio will create a Python script that uses an Aries Askar feature to migrate ACA-Py Indy SDK format storage data into Aries Askar format.
If you aren’t currently working with Indy SDK or Aries Askar, you might be wondering what this all means. For developers currently working in the space, this is very exciting news and something that will make it easier to update their projects to the next generation of open-source identity tools, functions, libraries, and repositories. This work is a milestone in the evolution of Indy and Aries to make room for further enhancements and project developments in 2023.
“BC Gov’s Code With Us challenge is a model for driving public sector digital transformation,” said Heather Dahl, CEO of Indicio. “As a company, we’re deeply committed to advancing open-source decentralized identity technologies and initiatives like this really move the needle in ways that benefit everyone.We’re excited to work with BCGov on this—especially as several of Indicio’s developers have already been developing and contributing to these particular efforts even before the challenge was announced.”
BC Gov also selected another company for the Code With Us Challenge project to Implement a version of the Indy CLI based on the Hyperledger Indy / Aries Shared Components. And because Indicio was also working on efforts related to this challenge, we were able to also contribute portions of our work to the team that was tasked with this project as well.
The Bifold Summit
Indicio is also involved in another open-source project, the first ever Bifold Summit, which is focused on developing a digital wallet for using verifiable credentials. Indicio contributed the initial Bifold code to Hyperledger Aries after Indicio’s own wallet was named a finalist in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) Trusted User Interface for Digital Wallets Challenge.
By donating the user interface (UI) to Aries, other developers would have access to a baseline to develop on. Now, with over a dozen organizations and individual developers helping to grow the project, Bifold is one of the most exciting projects at Hyperledger, garnering attention from a wide range of stakeholders from across the blockchain community.
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