 Welcome to the untold stories behind the Hyperledger community, a monthly podcast in which we invite contributors from across the Hyperledger ecosystem to share about why they're using Hyperledger projects and why they're actively involved in this community. While there are lots of venues to learn about the what of Hyperledger technologies, this show is focused on why individuals roll up their sleeves to help develop and deploy them. Each episode features an in-depth discussion with guests who are helping to shape the future of enterprise blockchain and their journey as leaders, developers, and open-source contributors. Conversations will delve into topics such as why they got involved with Hyperledger, why they're excited about the technology, and how they deal with the challenges involved in contributing to a large global open-source community. My name is Sean Bohan and I'm a community architect for the Hyperledger Foundation. Today I am speaking with Karim Stick-Helenberg and Baron Sledrecht, contributors to the Hyperledger community for several years, specifically on Aries and definitely on Aries Framework JavaScript, which is our topic today. Welcome to you both. Starting with Karim, would each of you mind introducing yourself, where you work, both the company and the location, and what you work on here at Hyperledger? Sure. Well, thank you, Sean. I'm Karim Stick-Helenberg. I'm co-founder and engineer at Alima Solutions. We are a, well, I guess, as I started based in Utrecht, the Netherlands. We have a small team of around 10 people and we work mainly on Hyperledger Aries Framework JavaScript. I think it's safe to say that we are the largest contributor to the project and we've done so for a few years. Hi, I'm Baron Sledrecht. I work for Animo. I started there with an internship once helping AFJ and I did that under supervision of Karim. I think that was about two years ago now from that point on just kept working at Animo, kept working on AFJ, been involved in the Aries community ever since. Outstanding. And thank you for joining us today to talk about the work you're doing on AFJ, Aries Framework JavaScript. I keep going AFJ. I have to say the whole thing. But before we get into AFJ and the work you're doing, let's answer a couple of questions about you both. Starting with Baron, when did you first get interested in software engineering? Like, what was the thing where you went, I want to do that? I think that was like, I wasn't not specifically software engineering, I guess, but I think when I was in primary school somewhere, my dad got me a computer, which only gave a blue screen and nothing else. Didn't do anything. And it was amazing to me and I had a remote control. And again, it didn't do anything. And I love the buttons. And I think from that point on, it was something to do with computers and then my software engineering making stuff with computers, it seems like a quite natural fit for me. Also, it's a bit of the background. Karim, what got you started down this road? Man, I wish I had an exciting story like Baron has. No, well, I don't know, as a teenager and student, I had quite a messy period, I guess I didn't know what to do at all. So at some point, I did the hotel school. And after that, I started working in, well, in, in restaurants and cafes in the kitchens. And after a year, I realized this is not what I want. So then I sort of randomly picked from a long list of, of studies you could do. And I ended up in electrical engineering and started doing that was terrible at the mathematics, but did discover software engineering there and that I was actually quite good at it, which frustrates my mom because my mom is a software engineer as well. And she is all my life, she has told me, you should do this. And I already said no. Yeah, so it comes around. But anyway, that is, yeah, so through electrical engineering, I discovered software. Awesome. So Karim, do you remember the first open source project you used? So the first, well, I, multiple, I think, probably because through my electrical engineering year, in my studies, I worked with Arduino and I don't know if that is a known to everyone, but it's like an open source hardware project that also comes with, with like a C++ library. And yeah, I think that's probably the first one, maybe open frameworks is another C++ framework for weird art installations, visual stuff. But I think those, one of those two must be the first one. Very cool. And Bernd, what was the first open source project or product that you used? Well, I mean, I knew that I wanted to do something with computers from very early on, but I was quite a lazy kid in high school. So the first project I probably used was Python in the start of college. I didn't do anything before that, was just waiting to go to college and then start doing it from there. Awesome. Yeah. I was expecting Firefox and you guys, you know, you went totally hard. Internet Explorer. That's getting navigator. So I guess turning over to Bernd, what was the first open source software community you participated in, where you were a contributor or even just, you know, working on it? Every single JavaScript. Yeah, clear and simple. That's the start. Awesome. And it was your internship with Dynamo, obviously. Kareem, what was your first open source community that you participated in and contributed to? Well, my answer is not too different from that of Bernd, but for me it was Akapai, because we actually, I met my other co-founders in university as well, and we got into the whole SSI space because of a university project that was, yeah, we were building with Aries Cloud Agent Python. So from there, we at some point progressed to Aries Framework JavaScript. Outstanding. I don't really need to ask the next question, because you just both explained what motivated you to go from being a user to actually being active in the community and contributing. But I want to back up for a second and talk a little bit about Hyperledger and then a little bit about Blockchain and get into what you're doing with Aries Framework JavaScript. But you're both maintainers in the AFJ community. What's the role of a maintainer? What within an open source community of contributors and some contributors are contributing code, some people are doing bug fixes, some people writing documentation. What does the maintainer do in a community? So for us it has mainly been everything actually. We've been scrolling through the issues, helping people there. We've been in the discord, there are always issues. There's always something going on with people needing help to to get started. Mainly also, of course, been maintaining the framework. We've been programming in it, we've been adding features out of personal interest, out of clients that need a specific feature and we've been adding it to the framework. A big part of it is also the working group calls, hosting it, getting a bit of a discussion going, taking in everyone's opinion and then deciding what's best for the framework and not only what you and your clients want. I think finding a bit of a balance between that and now with helping with issues, it's important that people can get started fairly easily. We've been spending quite a bit of time on that part, so we don't actually have to help everyone because it's supposed to just work, which has been one of our main goals with AFJ that it just works, which it's been going quite well. We've gotten quite a bit of compliments about it, but I mean, we're still running into some like build issues of course. And Karim, if a developer, so not someone who thinks they want to become a developer or just starting out, but a developer wants to start contributing open source, where would you suggest they start? What would be the rabbit holes you would recommend to them? Open source in general or is that? Open source in general. Hey, I want to get involved in a project. What's like the best starting point? So this counts, definitely counts for every framework JavaScript, but I think for most open source projects, I've been, well, not working on actively, but a little bit involved in. I mean, GitHub definitely is the place to be for when it comes to source code and version management. Everything is on GitHub. Well, no, not everything. There's also GitLab and other things, but I mean, I think the majority of serious open source projects live on GitHub. So that's I think the first place to go and to check out the project. Then a lot of these communities also have a Discord channel or Discord server where you can ask questions and usually can talk to, well, the maintainers or the contributors to the project. This is exactly what we do in every framework JavaScript as well. And then I think from there, it really probably depends on the particular project. We have working group calls because this is not just an open source project made by one person, but really a hyper leisure community driven project. So we have to coordinate. So we have bi-weekly calls on Thursdays where we discuss contributions, issues, PRs, that kind of stuff. But I think those first two look for channels where to chat about the project and go on to GitHub, read issues, comment on issues, get into that. Awesome. Thank you. Let's get into the most important thing. Identity. Baron, what is your definition of decentralized identity? Do you mind if I hand this over to Karim? No, I don't mind at all. Karim, what is decentralized identity to you, Karim? Not centralized identity, but that's a very bad answer. Now, so I'll try to make this short because I am always way too lengthy in my work, but so classically digital identity lives in what we call silos. If you look at physical identity like passports, you get a passport that's a physical document you get, you carry with you, you control it, you decide who you show it to and who not to show it to. And with digital identity or digital information in general is easily modified, copied, exchanged, et cetera. So that same model is way harder to achieve. Because if you look at, for instance, a passport, it has security features. That's what we call them. Those are the little shiny things on your passport and the weird figures in the background. Those security features are there to make it very hard to reproduce or to counterfeit. And that with digital information doesn't really exist normally. So we ended up in the digital world to say, you know what, we're not going to use that same model. Instead, we will rely on other trusted parties to store that information for us. So if I need to online, if I'm an entity and I want to know something about someone, let's say I want to know your birthday, whatever. Then I would reach out to a party I trust that has already done a know your customer process, KYC process, that's what we call it for you. So for instance, a bank usually has a pretty thorough verification process before you can enroll or open a bank account in a bank. So they do a certain verification process. And because that decentralized nature which we see in physical identity is so hard to reproduce digitally, these banks offer services, KYC services where they can tell, but basically other people ask, hey, can you give me some information about this or is this information true about the person and they assert yes or no. So the problem of that is in the end, a lot of data of a lot of different people and users is locked into a database, a silo as we call that. So it's all together. The trouble of that is you have a well, a big treasure trove of information which makes it interesting for hackers. But also the data that is about you now lives somewhere else in an environment that is not under your control. And I think that is a problem that became evident when you look at scandals like Cambridge Analytica and there are many more where you don't have control over the data that is about you. So what is decentralized identity? It is basically a philosophy or model to bring these security features we have in physical identities, the shiny things I talked about when passports, to bring that to the digital world and that is done by the use of heavy use of cryptography and cryptographic signatures and all kinds of other magic. I don't fully understand mathematically. So I think that is it in a nutshell. No, that's a great answer. So you laid out a pretty interesting case for decentralized identity in the enterprise and hyperledger projects are enterprise blockchain projects. But since I got involved with decentralized identity a couple of years ago, I've described it in a second way and that's the superpowers it gives the individual. So it goes from being these multiple silos have a lot of data about me to I have now more control, more agency over the data about me, what it can be used for. Can you just touch on what are these superpowers that the person gets when their bank is working in a self-sovereign identity model or their insurance company or their landlord? I've used the example in the past of like when you want to get an apartment in New York City, you have to show up with a folder full of information about you and hope they shred it when they're done. Can you talk a little bit about the individual and what self-sovereign identity or decentralized identity could mean to them? Sure. So first, just to clarify on the enterprise side, I think in Europe, we're a European company, we have the GDPR which is like privacy, a privacy law which is pretty strict about how to deal with a personal identifiable information. So we see a lot of because there are serious consequences if you are not treating that data as like securely as you should, which if you think about it like there are a lot of small web shops etc that just don't have the capacity to do that. So a lot of parties and a lot of enterprise or smaller companies, they don't want that data anymore because now they have to deal with all that stuff around it. Plus, another cool thing is the data because we have all this cryptographic assurance behind it, you can be much more sure that the data you're presented with is actually correct and the definition of correct is a whole other philosophical discussion I'm not going to touch on, but so for the individual itself, I think it's a double-edged sword. You get that control. I think that's a very important one. I think a lot of people right now you see sort of nihilism I think when it comes to privacy and a lot of people with a lot of people, especially less technical people, they're like yeah but everybody knows everything anyway about me. Well yeah, that is because we ended up in this situation but that doesn't have to be like that and I think that is something that's decentralized that you can bring to the table and you spread like next to control you don't need to spread your data that much. Like now I have to give my birth date when I sign up to services, websites, whatever my email addresses are everywhere. I get about I think 40 emails that are just purely spam each day because I have spread my email address so much and I was forced to. So in that sense I do think it is interesting and if you really look at the online use case, I think a very big win is a single credential login or at least less credentials because if you look at a username or email address password model if you want to do it securely you have to use a unique password everywhere that means you need if you want to do that because you're going to have to manage a lot of credentials you need to use a password manager not everyone is capable of doing that so in the end everything is less secure. I think that is a incredible win for the user in the end it's just that it can lower that barrier there is one other side I'd say is with getting the control and this is something we are like that is that it's a difficult problem but I think the whole community is actively working on it with getting back that control there's also responsibility you have your credentials so you need to manage them like right now if I lose my password somewhere I can just reset my password or something similar if you are managing all your credentials and you are the only one that is managing those credentials and you lose them or you make a mistake yeah you have a problem and this is it's comparable to the problem we've seen with private keys and crypto right yeah very cool thank you if that's a great answer um let's get to the most important topic for today which is aries framework javascript uh baron what is aries framework javascript yeah that is that is a good question um so I'll I'll just refer to it as afj to keep it a bit quicker um but afj started out as why I guess Korean would know it better how it started out exactly but it started out as a as a framework that implemented the aries rcs which are created as a set of protocol specifications documents that everyone can follow the same sort of rules and we can all talk to each other all different aries implementations we have on python and go and dotnet and javascript of course and we want to talk to each other so afj is a implementation of those specifications um we've mainly been focusing on staying in compatible with as many environments as possible so we have um we have environments for service with no js we are fully working on um mobile environments or reignitives all those wallets they they can run on afj we also have I think it's two projects now running in electron so we really want to like stay available for everyone so that people with small teams startups uh personal projects for students uh you only need to need to learn like javascript or typescript and you can get started with afj another main focus of course is usability we really wanted to be as easy as possible to get started with it and to provide as many features as we can which is quite important to us we've also recently in the last couple months I think we've been working on basically extending beyond aries so we've been looking into open ID and other credential formats so that we can be a more useful framework for more and more people and to also like bridge the gap a bit between different kind of protocols and different kind of standards um I think that's a bit of uh the answer to what is afj that that is great and we touched a little bit earlier on on why you contribute to afj but you're both contributors to afj areas from javascript but you also work for a company um animo and and does animo have its own wallet built on afj like is that is that part of what you're doing like you're building in this open source community but you also have your own products based on that open source project project so um uh yes uh yes and no we have we have built like we when we started animo the the main mission was um because again as I touched upon earlier during the student project we we we started working with aries aries cloud age python um and we noticed okay this is really hard like it is not easy there are a lot of specifications a lot of in-depth technical knowledge and if you look at identity it is everywhere so we really chose aries from javascript to just because it's one multi-platform as as baron just just mentioned but because it is the it is still the widely the most widely used language out there um so over the years we have well worked on the framework itself mostly done client work so we've built built a lot of wallets for others um we've offered consultancy and also worked on more back end like issuer and and verifier kind of stuff and about a year ago we've started working on our own product which is called paradigm which is basically a um a a software as a service service um where uh where we try to really really abstract all the difficulties away so um you basically have a yaml configuration file where you can um configure your ssi flows um which is really extensible uh and then next to that because um the service site um is usually for the issuer and the verifier um so alongside that we are launching um also a wallet which is called the paradigm wallet which will be in the app store soon uh but it's uh and it is we have built a lot of wallets before we started thinking about building our own right and and the paradigm wallet the last time it was at animo.id which is the website for your company we are going to include the links to part of this to all this discussion in the show notes um there's a waitlist now for a paradigm correct you're doing a pre sign up before it's released well um I don't know when this is being posted but uh paradigm will be released tomorrow um which is the first of September so probably when the when this podcast goes out uh it's already there it's already there um yeah but people can visit paradigm.id um for for the product um or or animal.id for for our company website awesome um you work on your own wallet you work on a open source project for wallets and agents you work on client work for folks who either on the issuer side or the verifier side how important is interoperability to decentralize identity this is for interview anybody can pick this up but um initially when I got involved interoperability was everything and the standards were going to help with that and the the build was going to help with that open source is going to help that but what's your opinion on on interop and how important that is to what an ecosystem that we're trying to build yeah I mean we are talking about identity right and identity is such a big topic like I touched uh on the um the password example earlier on and if you think about it like a physical password this is it is it has been a very interoperable document for a long long time not every passport is recognized everywhere there are some countries that are not being recognized by others but in general it's a really interoperable document and you don't want to have the situation where you cannot prove something about yourself purely because someone uses other technical standards that would be a yeah that would not be very convenient and there are a lot of credentials that that that require global recognition if you think about um maybe have an american student that did their bachelor's in america and now wants to continue their masters in europe um if those two uh if those two continents used over or countries used very different um yeah standards and and they are not able to talk to each other there we have a problem um so you want to have this um this interoperability but on the other side it is also unlikely that the whole world will agree on one standard so uh because I mean also identity information is quite culturally um um yeah what's sensitive and and and what is sensitive and how to handle certain things are really uh dependent on on culture and on all kinds of other things um so instead of looking at all agreeing on one standard which I think the only standard that that that ever achieved that is probably HTTP and maybe html it would be good if we have just the select few and then build bridges between those but yes extremely important really um how does afj not necessarily how does afj work but how does what is the afj focus on interoperability like when when y'all are being maintainers and you're working with new contributors or you're talking to companies that are thinking of using afj what is the interoperability story you tell there so i mean like like what korea mentioned it's extremely important and and also for us because we we don't want our framework to be like like you have to use 10 different kinds of frameworks and use them together and then you can build a wallet that is interoperable in two countries you want like you want like we choose the typescript or JavaScript because it's usable everywhere we also want afj to be usable everywhere and so for aries um like within aries we also kind of have interoperability profiles which is mainly so we can talk from aries to aries which is i mean it's it's also still interoperable because we we want to talk with akapai because we we want to talk with with issuers so with afj we've also been focusing on that for quite a bit so getting to those they're i think they're two and they're working on a third one aip one aip two we've been working on getting those like like all the checkmarks to to talk with other agents with that um and aries itself i mean the the specification it's i mean it comes from hyperledger indy and then from aries there's uh ditcom that is also separated out of it so it's been a bit of a it's been a bit of a ride um but we now also want to or look into and have been developing on um support for non indy credentials or now anacrets which will also again help with interoperability so if you get a credential issued in in format a we can use like ditcom which is more aries and we can prove it via open id but it will be the same credential so within aries there has been quite a bit of interoperability also with other standards and for afj specifically um like now what i said before we've really been looking into going broader than just aries um which might go into a bit of a naming issue but we've been really been looking into like the eu and what they've been proposing with open id and with stj wt's json ld we've really been looking into supporting all of that and we know that not everyone or not every country or every company will use the same standards so we really want to provide a way for people to use afj however they want to use it and that would mean like okay you you want to support open id and you want to support uh json ld credentials but you you don't want anacrets for whatever reason then you are free to do so and you can just take it out you don't want to support open id because you don't want to be uh your your wallet shouldn't work in europe then leave it out we we want our framework to be extremely modular so people can really fit it for their use cases and for their for the parties they want to be interoperable with and they don't want to like fill the app with features that that people don't need and man the apple 300 megabytes that that's going to take up your whole phone with everything that you don't want oh that's an awesome answer and that extensibility is so important uh which also makes this interview slightly more extensible because barron mentioned uh the european digital wallet architecture reference framework also known as the arf um animo your company recently announced making aries framework javascript a global framework and this is something that probably says the most important thing y'all are working on right now can you describe first of all what is the arf and and and your response as an organization both to the arf uh with this program but also your challenge to the aries framework javascript community like hey let's rally let's let's get something done here so if you could start with just what is the arf and what the arf is asking for and then what is this response in making aries framework javascript a global framework sure um so the arf is um the european unions or it's a document published by the uh the european commission um i think it is correctly um that outlines basically their vision for the uh the decentralized uh identity ecosystem um in europe so um they have already announced like years and years ago that they want to get into this and uh well slowly uh but steadily they are um they are working on it and this this uh this document the architecture reference framework is a reference framework for specifically wallets um um and it outlines um the standards they will use um so um barron already mentioned a few of those um open id for uh for vc so that's open id for verifiable credentials which is um um a open i yeah open id is a much broader uh a much broader organization i guess instead of standards um but this basically integrates verifiable credentials into into that um but there is also the um a different credential format which is um called sdjwt so like disclosure for uh json web token based credentials um so that is what the architecture reference framework is in a nutshell it's just a document that outlines um yeah the standards that we use and and and requirements around identity information um this effort um um that we have proposed so erie's framework JavaScript is based on erie standards as as barron already described and the standards that are outlined in the erf are not erie standard so we basically have a um um a framework and as a european company you know it's it's i mean every framework is still very relevant in the u.s and in in canada but um here it looks like uh um here in europe it looks like we're moving in a different direction so our um proposal we have we basically proposed some work we are seeking funding for um is to add um to add support for these for these um for these standards um to afj to erie's framework JavaScript um which which will make that framework um yeah it will make it usable in the in the european union which is one thing but also um most as i think is well from what i see is most solutions frameworks or um yeah as design solutions out there they are somewhat opinionated so they make choices um and okay we are going to support these standards but these not um and that is usually quite um yeah it really depends on the jurisdiction you're in if that if that makes sense yes or no we try to do not do that um so by offering this it's not only going to be usable in in the european union but it may also act as a bridge between different um kinds of standards so as uh i think abearned already touched but touched upon it you could get a credential issued over at didcom and now present proof of it over open id or the other way around um so that is um that's the work we are proposing and yeah we want to get started and what is it in tail um you need to you have a fundraising component but you also have a building component could you touch on each of those and talk about what's going into it the fund for the one we know how to do this because we are quite familiar with the framework uh ourselves um but and we'd like to do it but we we don't we don't have the money to put like um months of work to just invest months of work into that plus there is a lot of other people that are also interested um that are using the framework and and and my benefit from it so the funding component there is just um hey we we know what to do we've done some research we think we have estimated it's going to cost us this amount of time we've calculated that through to like an hourly hourly rate and um and um yeah um sum that together so we are seeking funding for that which would be great and the building component is like if there are experienced either standards developers so the people who work on the specifications themselves um there are still also some gaps there so we are welcoming all kinds of contributions in that sense um or if there's a very experienced developer that or or someone who wants to just help a hand and get into and get into the framework and and and well and contributing then they are more than welcome this is quite a uh it's it's I wouldn't call this a um good first issue as they say on github it's it's because it is quite heavy standard work um yeah we are welcoming um all kinds of contributions in that regard and it's an interesting form of uh funding open source in the sense that um bc.gov has had a history over the years of doing code with us programs where the bc team needs a very specific feature it's aligned with the roadmap and they're willing to put up funding for independent developers to step up and make those things happen this is another this is uh it's not the same it's an interesting twist on on what they're doing and it's it's actually quite cool what's the timeline like what is what is the the if not optimal the uh schedule the the areas framework javascript team would like to see between funding and actually moving into development so moving into development is um it depends on funding right so uh if I mean if we are not sort of sure that we at least we can get a good portion of that funding then it is hard for us to start um I we have looked at like just the whole time estimation I think if um if we could start today then uh it would take us well I think if we play it safe let's say and and the February to to get all the working um there has been some um um the a few parties came forward and and have expressed their interest and and actually committed to funding so um the open id package uh because there are basically four work packages I don't know if I mentioned that four but I'll quickly could you go into a little detail on that that'd be great yeah sure so um the the overarching uh goal is to to make it compatible with the area right to implement all those standards and if you look at that at the requirements and standards there we have divided them up into uh what we call four work packages so one of those is um the mdl mobile driver's license or mdoc standard which um the european union uh but this is already used by apple but apple wallet for instance the driver's license works uh works with this european union wants this for proximity um verification flows so uh if if you're being stopped by a cop and you get the registration and driver's license please that um that's that you basically you couldn't do it without an active internet connection but over bluetooth or or or nfc or something so that is a different credential type a different exchange protocol so we're bringing that to eris frame which i have a script then the arf also um requires you to um to use a uh something that's called a hardware security module which is basically a little chip in your phone um that contains a private key a cryptographic private key and you cannot get it out um because if with cryptography it works if you have a private key then um yeah you have the master key so if if i steal baron's private key now i can pretend i am baron and that's not what you want so that's one of the requirements the other one is um as mentioned like open id for verifiable credential um i'd say um specification suite they are the three major uh specifications in that uh in the suite which is uh open id for verifiable credential issuance which handles the issuance side then you have self-issued open id provider which um is is needed for the verification side of things and then you have open id for verifiable presentations it's a long breath um so those um those three protocols will integrate and last but not least um i quite new um it's a very interesting standard uh or credential format i should say is um sdjwt so um that is uh selective disclosure for jason web token based credentials and selective disclosure basically means if i have a credential that has five attributes in them my first name last name street name age and i don't know the country i was born in whatever that i'm able to just disclose a few of those without breaking the cryptographic signature behind it so those are the the four work packages um we have divided it in and so the last two the open id um suite work package and yes the uh jwt work packages they have already been uh getting some interest and we have had some new commitments on that side so we will actually start uh that work um next week so from the 1st of uh september and for the other two um yeah really depends on on what the response the community response is awesome and we kind of already touched on how this is going to help the rest of the aries community everyone's going to learn from this work period full stop but also how it's going to help the overall decentralized identity ecosystem and more importantly make aries work within the eu under these new arf guidelines um maybe for baron how can individuals and companies get involved if someone is interested in either being a funder or wants to raise their hand say i myself and two of my friends would like to help build on this like how to how can how can folks get engaged so i i think for for contributing to the packages or for for funding uh directly i think you can you know my boss kareem at animo but i d um i'm sure it will be will be linked somewhere um for basically when it's finished um you can use it by installing afj it's uh npm install at aries framework slash core and then you can just use it um right away and if you install all the correct packages you you should be good to go really really thank you so much yeah so just go ahead just add that quickly because we have a um we have a live document um that's which is just a google doc document that's public um and everybody can comment or make suggestions on that which outlines the work i guess we can put that in the that will be that will be the show notes absolutely um and please check out that document if you're interested in participating um there you find everything also my contact information um the like the the estimated pricing uh around around every workbook agenda and also if you we've already had this like we the original drafts uh we made uh there were parties interested but they wanted to have a extra feature or just to extend it a little bit so we are super open to that so that document is definitely the place to be brilliant and that's going to evolve over time obviously um with the participation which is really exciting um let's talk a little bit about the future because we're coming close to time um there's been a lot of activity and identity projects in hyperledger this year a non creds became a project at the end of 2022 uh ursa moved to end of life areas is growing across not just afj but also the other parts of areas there's tons of work going into didcom which makes me super happy because it's my favorite thing and decentralized identity as everybody knows i just don't i don't want linkedin anymore and i don't want anybody between me and my connections anymore good degree that that's my that's my personal thing um but also the indy community is working on the future of indy uh coming up in the next few weeks there's going to be indy summer part two what are your thoughts on the future and this is going to be the a huge question but your thoughts in the future of of areas and just wallets in general like where is areas going what is making you excited what's keeping you engaged um oh that that yeah that is a very very very good question um i think areas in general as a as a good future um i think it is still difficult for me to see where exactly it is going um because we we used to have like any credentials which is now separated to anum crats and like the indy SDK has been separated out we have separated out didcom and at some point areas will just be or at least how i see it um mainly stole this from timo uh but as a a an interoperability profile for the areas rfcs that we have um so it will be a how i see it a a set of standards um and a group of those standards and then you can say like hey i implemented this group of standards and now i can talk with with these agents um i think the the future of like the frameworks that that implement those standards will just just continue um i think akapi is also um looking into like um creating a more modular framework uh i'm doing a bit what what we've also been doing like like separating a couple things out so you can pick and choose what you want i think they're also interested in sporting more um and looking broader than uh what what what what we have been doing now um so it is a bit of uh like a difficult question as well um we've been looking into and talking internally uh within the areas community about where where the code should live uh should it stay under hyper ledgers should it stay under the open wallet foundation um and now there i mean the discussion is still going on a lot of people have their opinion um a lot of people are like well as long as we can contribute the code and as long as we can keep using it it doesn't really matter to us uh so i think someone has to as to make a decision um i think for for us it it we're a bit more i think in the both of we as long as the code works we're fine with it uh we we we love the code we we love to work on it and if it's under owf or under hyper ledger we'll just keep working on it and it will keep growing um and then to to to answer your last point about wallets uh i think that is a very difficult question um i think in general how i would like to see it at least is where i think it's going is that at some point most people will have a wallet um but i do think that most people also won't really know they have a wallet so maybe they will have to install it from there from their government or during some process and they will have it on their phone but they will not scroll through it they will not use it on a daily basis that they are aware of i think seeing something like how the apple wallet works for when you want to pay quickly you i mean you know you have the app but i never opened that app in my life unless i just want to pay quickly so i i think it's almost like the guaranteed feature for future for wallets um the people will have them um but it will be important that we there will be a lot of a lot of there will be regulation around it um because we don't want a a party from a certain big tech company to create a wallet with specific standards which no one can talk because there are private standards and then we just have everyone use the same wallet and no one knows what is going on and you can't bring your own wallet which is what we would like to do so we're really hoping on a bit of regulation around that that the standards that wallet implementers will implement are open and we don't want like closed circles we want everyone to be able to talk to each other and we want everyone to be able to understand it and if you are scared for any reason of a big tech company or a government that you can bring your own wallet which talks these same protocols and you can use that as long as it meets some regulation and guidelines let's go around this really circles back around beautifully i think through your first comment or somewhere at the beginning shan like about firefox because i i guess you want to go to a situation that is browser like where everybody like there's no i there are no websites where that i can only visit with firefox right they can you most most website i can i mean chrome is sometimes doing some funky stuff but in general that's the thing and um it's i find it difficult because you want to have multiple but you also don't want people to have to think too much about identity um and i think in the end why do people choose chrome versus safari versus firefox it is you why mostly i think you wax just or in my case because i put it on my mom's computer and i told her this is the one you want to use and and it updates and it keeps her safe but at the same time you know you made a great point earlier kareem about with great power comes great responsibility and having more control and having more agency gives you superpowers but you then need to be responsible for um thank you for that baren that was a great great answer let me ask you we only have a few minutes left um what does the afj community need um how can people get involved uh what what can folks how how what do you need what is what is the afj community if you could wave a magic wand and have x tomorrow what would x mean i think the the main thing what we would like is like people to come to the working group calls and show their their usage of afj um sometimes it it sort of feels like we're we're building things that that we would like to be in there but we we we miss a bit of input from people that are using it um and we would like to you know focus afj on like people are using it what would you like then we might be able to edit we can put it on the roadmap we can put a priority behind it if we if we we desperately want it um we want i think um people to to of course join the join the discord i think it's discord.com slash hyper ledger or discord.gg because it's you know discord we're gamers slash gg yeah it's funny open open source is um anyone can use it anyone can modify it anyone can share it which also means no one has to tell you when they're using it and so we routinely at hyper ledger find out oh there's a bank in this southeast asian country that's implemented x well they didn't have to ask permission they just did it and it is a frustrate it's a wonderful frustration because there are people using your product but as a x product manager i want the feedback of what happened like how easy was the onboarding where were the the friction or the pain points in you know doing the just the installation itself um what what is your wish list for features if you guys don't tell us we can't add them so yes um if you are using areas from your javascript please join the call or at least join the discord and let folks know what your experience has been let the team who's building this stuff know here's what we need um it it's it's it is awesome and the fact that anyone can use it and it's also uh frustrating in that you don't always get feedback and I absolutely respect that baron that's great um one last set of questions where can we find out more about animo um our website is a great place to start i guess um that's animo.id um so i think i think that's and that's a good i mean we're we're obviously also on twitter and and linked in um uh paradigm as as was previously mentioned or x i have to say thank you for correcting me there uh i think my phone it still says twitter but it has the x logo it's very confusing um paradigm as i previously mentioned is the uh is a product we're launching um tomorrow as of this recording um which uh which is paradigm.id you can go there um feel free to contact us at anytime um if you want to know more we're happy to chat always with people that are interested to get into the community um yeah and we will include links to all this in the show notes um your work kareem where can people find out more about you do you have a blog or is there a no i don't have a personal blog we have a we have a little well i mean i think in the last two months i wrote two for for for hyper ledger for you guys so so check check out the hyper ledger blog um kareem has written two fantastic blog posts for hyper ledger one previously on aries framework javascript 0.4.0 release which came out in june and most recently to coincide with this podcast he wrote a blog post about making aries framework javascript a global framework and that will be released shortly um but you personally you personally kareem not not the blog i have i i have a twitter account i barely use but i am committed to using it more that was my last year's resolution and it will become my x you're right i'm sorry and it will become my my next year's resolution probably that is at i'm pretty proud of this at ssi underscore kareem so excellent twitter handle there baron where can folks find out more about you you're muted buddy yes i also have a twitter or x or i don't know how to call it now account but i don't use it my resolution also is not to use it so that's probably not the best place is yeah my get up um it's uh there and see that but i think a link would be a little better than me saying it in dutch awesome we will make sure to include the link there and making aries framework javascript a global framework which is part of what we were talking about today we're going to have a link to the initial blog post that was written on the onimo.id site we're also going to link to kareem's blog post on the hyper ledger site as well um and if folks want to find out more they can check out those two resources or they can check out the discord there is an aries framework javascript channel underneath the overall aries project you can't miss it and that's where all the action in afj is happening um i would like to thank both baron and kareem for joining us today uh this has been a fantastic discussion we went a little bit longer than i thought um but it was absolutely worth it and uh we look forward to seeing more from the afj aries framework javascript team thank you kareem thank you baron thank you so much thank you