Project Health

Work on Hyperledger Aries related projects continues at a healthy pace, albeit with some of that work now outside of Aries itself. ACA-Py (formerly Aries Cloud Agent Python) achieved two significant milestones this quarter. Release 1.0.0 was published, and the project moved to the OpenWallet Foundation. Within Hyperledger Aries, progress was made on all of the frameworks – Aries VCX, Aries Framework Swift and Aries Framework Kotlin. Other OpenWallet Foundation-hosted projects, Credo-TS and [Bifold Wallet], continue to evolve rapidly, with Animo Solutions, key maintainers of Credo-TS, selected by the German Government into the next round of the the Funke (“sparkle”) initiative to create innovative wallet prototypes in preparation for the promised German EUDI Wallet to be released by 2026. Exciting times!

In light of the move of ACA-Py and some related repositories, including Askar to the OpenWallet Foundation, there is some uncertainty about the other sub-projects in Aries and whether they will stay in Hyperledger Aries or move elsewhere. Stay tuned as the maintainers on the different projects decide how to move forward.

Questions/Issues for the TAC

None at this time.

Releases

The following Aries releases occurred in the last two quarters (including the time covered by the Annual Report and so not yet reported):

Interoperability status can be still be seen here: https://aries-interop.info.

Overall Activity in the Past Quarter

Per the Aries Activity Dashboard for the months of July-September 2024, Aries codebases had 396 Commits and 105 contributors representing at least 10 organizations. The numbers do include the repositories that have moved from Hyperledger to the OpenWallet Foundation, as well as some obsolete (but unchanging) repositories. Per Ry Jones there is not a good way for us to control the included list of repos.

Aries Framework Reports

Aries VCX

Work is underway to build out the “VCX Framework” rust project. It will provide a more consumer-friendly rust framework interface, which will to sit alongside our existing lower-level suite of aries & DID related crates. This VCX Framework is also being developed with UniFFI bindings, enabling native iOS & Android (swift & kotlin) consumption of the framework.

Improvements to the suite of DID crates in VCX have also been made, particularly around more modern DID features (e.g. modern verificationMethods: Multikey, JWK). These improvements pave the way for our effort to expand the supported native DID Resolvers in VCX (https://github.com/hyperledger/aries-vcx/issues/1288). For instance, did:jwk resolver/registrar currently in review, and discussions underway about integrating did:tdw.

Finally we also have work in review to remove indy-sdk/vdrtools from the VCX suite after it had been in deprecated status for awhile https://github.com/hyperledger/aries-vcx/pull/1298.

ACA-Py

As noted, the ACA-Py project completed the milestone 1.0.0 release this quarter, and organized and executed the move from Hyperledger to the OpenWallet Foundation. There is lots happening in the community, with PRs arriving daily on things ranging from OpenID4VC support, improving DID handling (including the did:tdw DID Method), cleaning up technical debt, improving the test pipelines and more. There is a lot going on!

Current Plans

  • Determining where the repos remaining in Hyperledger should be long-term.
  • Organizing the new calls that replace the Aries Working Group call.

Maintainer Diversity

After the removal by Hyperledger of the inactive maintainers, there are currently 33 people on the 29 Hyperledger Aries teams representing at least 18 organizations.

Contributor Diversity

In the quarter there were commits from 105 individuals representing at least 10 organizations.

Additional Information

None