2025 Annual Review Hyperledger Aries

Project Health

Hyperledger Aries LFX Insights Page for Calendar Year 2024 (v. 2023) and for Q1 2025 Oct-Dec. (v. Q4 2024).

The Hyperledger Aries project has successfully transitioned its key sub-projects to the OpenWallet Foundation, ensuring their continued growth and adoption. This marks the conclusion of Hyperledger Aries under the LFDT umbrella, with this being the final LFDT Annual Report for the project.

Several Aries sub-projects, including ACA-Py and Credo-TS, have already found a new home in the OpenWallet Foundation, while Aries VCX is expected to follow shortly. The remaining repositories in Aries will be evaluated in the coming weeks, with a clear path defined for their continued maintenance or archival.

Legacy and Impact

Since its inception, Hyperledger Aries has been a foundational project in decentralized identity, enabling verifiable credential exchanges across enterprises, governments, and open-source ecosystems. Its impact can be seen in:

  • The adoption of Aries-based technologies in digital identity initiatives worldwide.
  • The evolution of privacy-preserving and interoperable credential exchange protocols.
  • The successful migration of Aries components to the OpenWallet Foundation, where they continue to thrive.

Maintainer Diversity

As Aries formally winds down, its maintainers have largely shifted their focus to projects within the OpenWallet Foundation. While active maintenance of the remaining Aries repositories has declined, the community that built Aries continues to support and evolve its core technologies under new governance structures.

Aries teams and a list of repositories can be found in the Hyperledger GitHub organization Control file.

Project Adoption

Interest in the components that had been in Aries remains very high.

Goals

Performance Against Prior Goals

For the record…2024 was a great and very busy year for the Aries collaborators.

  • ✅ Completion of the Unqualified DIDs Community Coordinated Update
  • ✅ Continued development and publication of Aries best practices.
    • ✅ Ideally, leading to a Long Term Support (LTS) program and an initial LTS release.
  • ✅ Ledger Agnostic AnonCreds support within Aries projects
  • ✅ OIDC4VC Protocol support, including relevant VC formats
  • ✅ Aries RFC Cleanup — Status Review and the human friendly publication of the Aries Protocol RFCs integrated with the DIDComm Protocols.
  • ✅ An evolution of the ‘Start Here’ documentation for the Aries Frameworks
  • Marketing: Publishing information about the range and maturity of Aries capabilities, and improving the overall awareness of Aries in Digital Trust and corporate circles.
    • ❌ Publishing a scalability report.
    • ✅ Information about the Aries frameworks’s flexibility in interacting with non-Indy ledgers/VDRs, and other than AnonCreds verifiable credentials.
    • ❌ Visibility of implementations and deployments
  • Continue/Expand alignment / interop efforts
    • ❌ JFF PlugFest
    • ✅ Aries Interopathon
    • ✅ OWF
    • ❌ Open Agent Framework
  • ✅ Aries Interop Profile (AIP) 2 completion / ❌ AIP 3 definition
    • ✅ DIDComm v2 / ❌ Trust Spanning Layer

Next Steps

The remaining eight Aries repositories are being evaluated to determine an appropriate final disposition. This includes:

  • Identifying repositories with ongoing value and facilitating their transition to the OpenWallet Foundation or other relevant communities. Of note, the invaluable Aries RFC repository and website are likely to move to the Decentralized Identity Foundation’s DIDComm Working Group.
  • Archiving repositories that are no longer maintained or needed.
  • Ensuring proper documentation is in place for any future reference or migration efforts.

Help Required

No help is formally needed. Perhaps a raised glass when the project wraps up.

Project Lifecycle Stage Recommendation

With its core technologies now under the OpenWallet Foundation, Hyperledger Aries has effectively completed its lifecycle within LFDT. The project should be formally archived in the coming months, ensuring that all valuable assets have been appropriately transitioned or documented for historical reference.

TAC Review Notes

TAC Meeting Recording - 2025.02.13 — Discussion starts at the 31:52 mark.